How Useful Are How-to-write Books?

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

How useful are how-to-write books to you?

I'm a fool for how-to-write books; I buy them all and immediately wish I hadnt.

For me, I need metaphors tied firmly to concrete examples. Dont be serving me nominalizations and other abstracts, becuz they dont compute in my brain.

When a reputable writer commands me to begin my story with snap, crackle, and pop I add a box of Rice Krispies to the scene.

"Daphne pointed the Luger at Reginald as she ate a bowl of Rice Krispies."

 

[bronzeage]

This post answers a lot of questions.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

You must be bored and got no fresh snow to write your name on.

 

[sr71plt]

I've only read one "how to" write book, and that was Stephen King's On Writing, which I only got around to reading recently. I enjoyed that one, but it wasn't really that heavy on the "how to," more a behind-the-scenes look at on how he did/does it. I buy/read a lot of "how to" books on grammar and getting published, though. (Even have one of the latter ones of my own published.)

There are a couple of more books like King's I've heard about that I might read someday. But a detailed, step one/step two book on how to write? No, don't plan to read one of those.

 

[OnlyByMoonlight]

I generally think they are a waste of time too. I used to buy them a lot when I was younger but grew out of it. The best way to learn to write is to write (and to read)

There was one that was pretty helpful though:

"Worlds of Wonder: How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Gerrold. Even though it was geared towards sci fi, it was just helpful in general. Other than that, they're not that great.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I generally deconstruct excellent writing to harvest the rules for creating excellent prose. But few writers can coherently articulate what it is they do when they write. And HOW-TO writers are the worst.

 

[lesbiaphrodite]

I think these kinds of books are a bit like 'how to have sex' books. They really are pretty useless. You learn from the doing. You don't learn from reading how to do it. That's just my opinion. I have read the great writers and have taken instruction from them. I never live up to the high standard that Hemingway, Poe, Miller, and the like set, but I try to benefit from the way they did it.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

LES

See I think that if you can cobble it together yo' self you can teach others to do what you did. The trick is to tie an abstract concept firmly to a concrete example.

On the other-hand style is what wells outta you; teach people French and some will warble and some will mumble it.

 

[oggbashan]

I have several.

A few give me ideas about how to improve my writing.

Some just don't help at all except by showing what NOT to do.

One book I read and read again is Quiller-Couch's On the Art of Writing. The book is an edited transcipt of his lectures to university students.

Here is an extract:

If you will possess yourselves of a copy of Quintilian, or borrow one from any library and turn to his 9th book, you will find a hundred ways indicated, illustrated, classified, in which a writer or speaker can vary his style, modulate it, lift or depress it, regulate its balance.

All these rules, separately worth studying, if taken together may easily bewilder and dishearten you. Let me choose just two, and try to hearten you by showing that, even with these two only, you can go a long way.

Take the use of right emphasis. What Quintilian says of right emphasis - the most important thing he says - is this: -

There is sometimes an extraordinary force in some particular word, which, if it be placed in no very conspicuous position in the middle part of a sentence, is likely to escape the attention of the hearer and be obscured by the words surrounding it; but if it be put at the end of a sentence is urged upon the reader's sense and imprinted on his mind.

That seems obvious enough, for English use as well as for Latin. 'The wages of sin is Death' - anyone can see how much more emphatic that is than 'Death is the wages of sin.' But let your minds work on this matter of emphasis, and discover how emphasis has always its right point somewhere, though it be not necessarily at the end of the sentence. Take a sentence in which the strong words actually repeat themselves for emphasis: -

Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.​

Our first impulse would be to place the emphasis at the end: -

Babylon, that great city, is fallen, is fallen.​

The Latin puts it at the beginning: -

Cecidit, cecidit, Babylonia illa magna.
Fallen, fallen, is Babylon, that great city.​