Review - Advice on Novel Writing
Storyimp will be using this area to share a variety of off-site online fiction, as well as writing resources.
The first resource I'd like to link to is Crawford Kilian's book Advice on Novel Writing online
Crawford Kilian is a prolific Canadian novelist, who has written in a number of different genres. Back in the early 90's Killian wrote 17 handouts for a course in commercial fiction writing. These handouts were collected under the title Advice on Novel Writing, and the entire set have been put online for free. These handouts cover a whole range of areas, including novel structure, plotting, genre writing and the practical business of getting published. This book is specifically for writing commercial fiction, and as such functions as a style guide for popular/genre fiction. The rules he identifies are a useful framework for any developing writer.
Here's a short excerpt from the section on understanding genre:
"As a novice writer, you should understand your genre's conventions consciously, not just as things you take for granted that help make a good yarn. In this, you're like an apprentice cook who can't just uncritically love the taste of tomato soup; you have to know what ingredients make it taste that way, and use them with some calculation.
So it might be useful for you, in one of your letters to yourself about your novel, to write out your own understanding and appreciation of the form you're working in. I found this was especially helpful with a couple of my early books, which fell into the genre of the natural-disaster thriller. Your genre analysis doesn't have to be in essay form; it just has to identify the key elements of the genre as you understand them, and that in turn should lead to ideas about how to tinker with the genre's conventions. And that, in turn, should make your story more interesting than a slavish imitation of your favorite author."
Click here to view the book