Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark: How Not To Write A Novel: 200 mistakes to avoid at all costs if you ever want to get published.

I am not sure why I wanted to read this book (except that, as so often, I was reeled in by the witty cover – a handgun pointed at a sweet fluffy kitten. It turns out that examples of the masterly or inept handling of Fluffy’s fate feature from time to time). I am not writing a novel, nor do I have an unpublished tear-stained manuscript in a drawer, nor do I think there is a novel deep inside me waiting to get out, in fact I’m certain there isn’t, because I’ve had a good look. But this book has pleasures and insights for the reader, as well as the writer. And as I DO write minutes, committee reports, business cases, powerpoints (shoot me now) and blog posts for Vulpes Libris, I found some of the advice relevant and helpful to me too.

The authors are professional readers of novels, as well as published authors. Mittelmark was worked in publishing and literary agencies, and has been a novelist, ghost-writer and reviewer. Newman is a teacher of creative writing and a journalist, as well as a published novelist. They write in a very lively and witty style, which makes this one of the funniest books of serious intent I have read for a long time.

They illustrate and describe their 200 worst sins of novel writing in an eerily skillful fashion. It must take an awe-inspiring mastery of technique to get each of their examples of ineffective writing exactly right, which they do. I say ineffective writing, not bad writing, as their other piece of genius is to emulate a good writer making a bit of a hash of it, or taking a wrong path, rather than a doomed writer who will never transcend mistakes. Each of the examples is given a catchy name, the better, I suppose, to stick in the memory (such as The Vegan Viking, where a character takes up an implausibly politically correct stance – Bernard Cornwell, please step forward – or The Unruly Zit, an awful warning against mishandling that fashionable gross-out material). Following an example of the particular writing sin, there is a commentary and some advice on how to take avoiding action. Then for each of the sections: plot, character, style including tone, voice and point of view, and special effects, there are shaded boxes with of generalised observations, advice and even some exercises. Finally, there is a section on selling the end product, which I think can be summarised as ‘When All Else Fails, Read The Instructions’. This is where the authors’ experience of the book world tells – they have seen it all: (‘Dear Agent who specified ‘Query Only Letter’: please find enclosed the 500 page manuscript of my novel But I’m More Specialer Than Everyone Else …’).

I smiled at some of the examples with a sense of recognition, and then thought – just a minute, these passages are supposed to be from unpublishable novels. So they do get through, don’t they. It will be fun from now on, when suffering my way through a novel I am not enjoying very much, to see if I can put a name to the particular longueur. For the reader of fiction, on one level, this book can be read as an amusing tour de force of comic writing, specifically, of parody. By illustrating the reverse, it is also full of insight of what it is about a successful novel that draws the reader in and sustains interest to the last page, and I liked that a lot.

Only a writer of novels will be able us to tell if this is a valuable and helpful writers’ manual or not. I really hope that writers will come back here with their own commentary on the book. I’d be interested to know as well if its relentlessly comic tone throughout is encouraging, or dispiriting for writers struggling to pull those creations that have their heart and soul in them into some sort of successful shape.

So for me, as a writer of committee reports, and … oh, you know, stuff for work, I don’t have to worry about my sex scenes being suitably arousing, or my bad guys being plausibly and competently evil, though I do take on board that if I risk a joke in the middle of my risk assessment, it had better be funny. But their single best piece of advice on plot, ‘Know what the chase is, and cut to it’, will from now on be my motto for everything I write. It may or may not enable me to break my bad writing habits.

Paperback: x, 262 pages.  Penguin Books, 2009.  ISBN 9780141038544