Survey About Books About Writing

[sunandshadow]

Hi all! :Thumbs: I have over the years written a bunch of essays on various aspects of writing, and recently I decided I should organize them all into some unified object (i.e. a bood, if it turns out long enough.) So, before I start some heavy rewriting, I wanted to ask you all what you like in books about writing theory and technique, so I can use your preferences as a guideline. :e2writer:


1) Tone: Do you prefer the book to be more scholarly or more informal/chatty? Why? Would including smilies be just plain too chatty?

2) Focus: Do you prefer the book to focus on a specific aspect of writing (in my case probably the structure of fiction) or to be more universal (Sunandshadow's theory of what fiction is and how to write it well)?

3) Length: What do you think is the minimum acceptable length (how many k words) for a book of this type? Does it matter if diagrams and bulleted or numbered lists make the same amount of words take up more pages?

4) Is there anything you would particularly like to see in this sort of book?

5) Would you personally be interested in critiquing the manuscript for this book some time in the next 6 months, and if so would you prefer it in chapter-sized chunks or a whole manscript?


Thnak you for sharing your opinion! :e2cheer:

[mistri]

What I want to know first (whenever I see a writing book) is why are *you* the best person to write this book. What have you published - how successful have you been? Or maybe you're an agent or an editor. I (probably) won't pay for a book by someone who's not published/an editor/an agent, no matter how many critiques they've written or years they've been trying to get published.

1) Smilies would probably seem a little unprofessional to me, though I abuse them myself in emails. I'm not too bothered about tone, though I guess too scholarly can seem overly-authoritive, whereas too chatty can go the opposite way. It's a fine balance.

2) Focus: I prefer books that are specifically about fantasy to books that are about fiction generally, but that's just a personal thing. Other than that, I read a wide range of writing books - ones that cover just structure, just worldbuilding, or ones that cover everything. So long as it's interesting and the author knows enough about the subject, I don't mind.

3) Length: I think you can get away with quite short books of this type (maybe as low as 40k - no idea really). Don't know enough about the processes non-fic books go about to answer this really.

4) Is there anything you would particularly like to see in this sort of book? Some market info/advice would be nice, but it's usually out of date or irrelevant to me (I live in the UK). I always like it when the author has interviewed some editors to get their take on things.

5) Would you personally be interested in critiquing the manuscript for this book some time in the next 6 months, and if so would you prefer it in chapter-sized chunks or a whole manscript? I am far too lazy, sorry :(

[sunandshadow]

5) We would love to critique your manuscript in a Beta Reader capacity :)

Thanks for sharing about your latest project,

Eggward The Walrus & Friend.

Thank you very much for your enthusiasm, it's very encouraging. :D Interesting that you mention Aristotle's Poetics - Aristotle does make two brief appearances in my current collection of essays: I agree with his statement that literature is a natural outgrowth of imitation or play and talk about his idea of unity as a principle of design. Hope neither of those would annoy anyone.


To clarify for everyone, the book will not contain any info on marketing/publishing because I know very little about that area. My background is in structuralist literary theory, theories of plot, linguistic principles, myth analysis, meme theory, psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, interactive fiction, and computer games. I believe this gives me a unique perspective: I approach creating a book not as an artist, but as a designer. I want to describe the form and function of fiction, and the principles of design which help an author create a story which does what they want it to do. :)

[MadScientistMatt]

I think the most important thing for a book on writing is a platform. I have five books on writing, and they all were written by someone with credentials that let me know the authors know what they're talking about. Four of the books have names of people I know are successful writers - E.B. White, Stephen King, and Jenna Glatzer. :) The fifth book is How Not To Write a Screenplay, written by someone who has only one successful screenplay but loads of experience at reading really bad screenplays and hence a lot of qualification at pointing out common mistakes. Strunk and White's Elements of Style has the added bonus that it seems that virtually everyone who talks about good writing and seems qualified says to go read it.

So if you've got some successful fiction out, I might consider buying your book.

[sunandshadow]

While I understand that credentials are important from many readers' point of view, they are actually pretty irrelevant from a writer's point of view. I mean think about it, whatever credentials I have are what they are, it's not like I can go out and real quick write and publish a few more books to improve them. :Shrug:

[Jamesaritchie]

While I understand that credentials are important from many readers' point of view, they are actually pretty irrelevant from a writer's point of view. I mean think about it, whatever credentials I have are what they are, it's not like I can go out and real quick write and publish a few more books to improve them. :Shrug:

I don;t think you canb separate credentials into reader and writer. As a reader, the credentials of an author mean everything to me. I never have understood how "Writing Down the Bones" was such a bestseller. A how-to book by someone who never has done anyting simply makes no sense. There's even less sense in following teh adive of someone who never has done what she's trying to tell you how to do.

Even from a writer's point of view, there are many, many types of books I wouldn't begin to write because I simply am not an expert on the subject, and lack the credentials to make anyone believe I am one. At best, I could write a layman's book on the subject. Nothing wrong with this at all, as long as the book didn;t prfess to be anything but a layman's book, and as long as I didn;t prfess to be an expert.

For me to read such a book, you would have to come up with something both new and convincing. There are many, many books on structuralist literary theory, theories of plot, linguistic principles, myth analysis, meme theory, psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, interactive fiction, and computer games. Most of them are written by highly credentialed experts in the various fields.

Most are also bone dry, and very few read them unless forces to in a college class.

I'd have to have a new take on these things, a new way of looking at them, or I might as well go buy the already existing books written by people with a string of credentials as long as my nose. And the book could not be dry. No one wants to read a dry book. The writing would have to be lively and entertaining.

[sunandshadow]

I think the reason books by people with no credentials can still be best sellers is pretty simple: some people judge a book only on its content (I am this type), and even more people are too lazy to research and see what sort of credentials a writer has.

As for lively writing, that I believe I can do, and I also believe I have something new to say - the books you mention are mostly each relevant to only one of those fields - my specialty is cross-disciplinary synthesis. :) If nothing else, it would be unique to see a book with a structuralist perspective marketed at the average writer and sold in Borders and Barnes and Noble, not written in dense scholarly language and hidden in a university library where nobody but a super English geek will ever see them. (I suppose that gives away my own bias towards 'chatty' as the answer to question 1, lol.)

[Jamesaritchie]

I think the reason books by people with no credentials can still be best sellers is pretty simple: some people judge a book only on its content (I am this type), and even more people are too lazy to research and see what sort of credentials a writer has.

As for lively writing, that I believe I can do, and I also believe I have something new to say - the books you mention are mostly each relevant to only one of those fields - my specialty is cross-disciplinary synthesis. :) If nothing else, it would be unique to see a book with a structuralist perspective marketed at the average writer and sold in Borders and Barnes and Noble, not written in dense scholarly language and hidden in a university library where nobody but a super English geek will ever see them. (I suppose that gives away my own bias towards 'chatty' as the answer to question 1, lol.)

I think content and credentials go hand in hand, but if you can write a book that covers all these subjects, and do so both indepth, and in a way that's entertaining, it's just the kind of book I'd be likely to buy.

I love reading about most of the areas you mention, but so many of the books on these topics I've had to read were written in dense, scholarly language, and the only reason I made it through most of them was because they were required reading.

The topics were often highly interesting, but the way they were written made me want to go blind.

[sunandshadow]

I really know what you mean, it's a painful battle to read some of these monsters. Not as bad as reading postmodern crap, but still pretty darn bad. Last year or so I read one article that I though made a brilliant point, and I went to quote the point in something I was writing, and I had to cut like 3 clauses out of the middle of the sentence and prefix it with a definition of one of the words before it even came close to making sense. :Wha: I mean, it is a complex subject, and you have to use specialized terminology like 'meme' and 'teleology', but that doesn't mean they have to use sentences with 6 clauses, or act like they're allergic to real world examples or humor.

[Jamesaritchie]

I really know what you mean, it's a painful battle to read some of these monsters. Not as bad as reading postmodern crap, but still pretty darn bad. Last year or so I read one article that I though made a brilliant point, and I went to quote the point in something I was writing, and I had to cut like 3 clauses out of the middle of the sentence and prefix it with a definition of one of the words before it even came close to making sense. :Wha: I mean, it is a complex subject, and you have to use specialized terminology like 'meme' and 'teleology', but that doesn't mean they have to use sentences with 6 clauses, or act like they're allergic to real world examples or humor.

Oh, yeah. The specialized terminology is a must, though I wish more writers would make the assumption that I don't necessarily know what every word means. I know most of them, but not all, and sometimes I need a refresher on one I do know, especially if I haven't had to use it in ten years. A brief definition in a footnote would work wonders.

And please stick to a sentence structure that lets me get the meaning with one reading.

[sunandshadow]

I hope no one minds me necroposting this topic, but I've been working on the book, and today I wrote the first draft of an abstract. Any opinions? Does this sound like a book you would like to read? Any parts of the abstract not make sense or seem displeasing in any way?


Currently, how-to-write theory and literary theory are two totally disparate fields, and both fields are internally quite disorganized. It is a waste to have all this scholarly work sitting around never applied to practical problems, and likewise a waste to have writers flailing around in the dark without a solid definition of what fiction is or how fiction works. So my goal in writing this book is to start with structuralist literary theory, develop it into a “unified theory of fiction” much like the sought-after unified field theory of physics, and explain this theory in an easy-to-read style with emphasis on practical applications in creating fiction.

I intend to explain why humans have the urge to create and consume fiction, describe the universal underlying structure of all fiction (including myths, plays, novels, and interactive fiction). This will involve exploring several topics in psychology such as the human language instinct, pretend play, mimesis, and the categorization of memory by scripts and schemas. I will also examine the psychology of what readers seek in fiction, and how to design these things into a story to make that story popular and satisfying to an audience.

Moving on to the structure of fiction, I will describe both the general and detailed levels of plot structure, incorporating existing how-to-write theory such as Freytag's pyramid, the story-as-circle, and the concept of motivation-reaction units. The core idea is that the plot is a thematic argument carried out through the conflict between the characters, which are thematic vectors.

Exploring the practical applications of all this theory, I will illustrate with concrete examples what kinds of thematic arguments there are, how casts of characters can be created to illustrate a thematic argument, and how specific plots and unique original characters can then be created to tell a story which will be meaningful because of its solid thematic foundation. I will further talk about how worldbuilding can also be designed to support a story's theme.

For those interested in interactive storytelling and computer-generation of fiction, sidebars throughout the book will explain how each main topic can be applied to these areas. Since the goal of this book is to completely describe the structure and function of fiction, and anything completely understood can be emulated by a computer, this book will, as a side effect, function as a description of how an interactive fiction generation engine might be programmed.

In conclusion, this book should be very helpful to anyone of an analytic bent who has wished for a logical and unified of what fiction is, what fiction does, why some fiction is more satisfying to audiences than others, and techniques for creating tightly-plotted, dramatically satisfying, meaningful stories.