Stein on Writing by Sol Stein.
By far, the best book I've read on writing to date. It has tips for writers of nonfiction as well as fiction. Its a long read, only because I felt the continual need to add highlights, underlines, and to run back to Word for note sessions after something he wrote inspired a thought for my personal novel.
Stein isn't your run of the mill author/editor. He's pretty dang condescending and has little use for commercial best sellers. For example on page 6 he states that he advises his students to read John Grisham's
The Firm to examine samples of how a writer produces what he later calls "hack work" insofar that there are words and phrases used that make no sense at all.
He pulls direct examples from The Firm later in his book, devotes pages 249-250 to sliding a rough bamboo skewer through the flesh of Grisham's work, and to Stein's credit the excerpts are indeed laughable.
One quote he has is from a conversation where Mitch slings barbeque sauce into his eyebrows from a cooked rip he tears apart. Mitch's wife Abby doesn't notice. What she says is:
"We just moved in this morning."
Mitch knows this so he replies,
"I know."
:laugh2:
There are a dozen more quotes in the book that show how a great piece of commercial literature and a blockbuster movie really was very poorly written with little attention to detail by the author.
Stein is obtuse in his disdain. No doubt about it. However, it made me open my eyes to further developing the writing of any book to grander aspirations.
The chapter on novel titles is funny as he relates anecdotes of several well known pieces of literature.
Hurrah for the Red, White, and Blue was later retitled,
The Great Gatsby. A work originally titled
Twilight has no mentions of sparkling vampires and now resides in libraries across the world under the more familiar name of
The Sound and The Fury.
The chapter on dialogue was hands down better than the entire book I started reading on dialogue that I reviewed on another page of this thread.
Great book for an aspiring writer.