If you’re an intermediate fiction writer and are ready to write a novel then Break Into Fiction will put you on the right path. National workshop speakers, Mary Buckham and Dianna Love, point out that there’s a logical progression of steps to take. “Although there is no formula for writing a book,” they say, “the instructions and templates in this book show you how professional writers develop a budding idea into a full-fledged novel with depth, emotion, and dynamic pacing.”
Break Into Fiction provides “easy-to-understand templates that guide new writers through building a novel, while showing more experienced writers how to elevate their first draft.”
Mary Buckham and Dianna Love take you through eleven steps to building a story that sells. As it says in the book’s introduction, “Great stories don’t happen by accident. They are a result of creating a powerful character-driven plot.”
By the time I read Break Into Fiction, I’d already completed four novels, but the book’s templates (using the movie, Finding Nemo, as my guide) helped me clarify my overall story goals and intentions and then map out the key elements of the plots (or Twist Points) for the synopses I need to capture an agent’s attention.
Another book I strongly recommend for novice and veteran is The First Five Pages, A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, by Noah Lukeman. The book reveals the criteria agents use for rejecting manuscripts. By scrutinizing the first few pages of your novel closely enough, you can use what you learn to improve your whole. Part one covers the preliminary problems with presentation, such as adjectives and adverbs, sound, comparison and style. Part two covers dialogue, and part three, covers the bigger picture, such as showing versus telling, viewpoint and narration, setting , pacing and progression.
Lastly I recommend, Hooked: write fiction that grabs readers at page one and never lets them go, by Les Edgerton. The entire book, yes all 236 pages, is devoted to those difficult opening chapters of your book. As Edgerton says in his introduction, your story’s beginning “is very possibly the most important part of the story you’ll write, and you need to get it right if you want your story to see print.”
Edgerton discusses such things as story structure and scene, opening scenes, the inciting incident, setup and backstory, characters, foreshadowing, scene length, and the view from the agent’s and editor’s chair, all in a funny and entertaining voice.
As a beginning or intermediate fiction writer, you’ll enjoy and learn from these three books, and will likely refer to them over and over again.
How good is that?
