The Writing Book: A Practical Guide for Fiction Writers

Written by Kate Grenville, author of Lillian’s Story and The Secret River, The Writing Book not only talks about how to write fiction, it’s a step-by-step interactive process of how to do it. Filled with numerous exercises covering all aspects of the field, it’s a comprehensive and accessible reading experience with a clear goal at the end of it. 

Each chapter is carefully structured with an explanation and description of the central focus: dialogue, characters, description, voice etc, outlining what it is and what it does for a piece of fiction. To relieve the sometimes dryness of the textbook explanation, each chapter is then fleshed out with examples from various fiction pieces, giving the reader field-displays as well as breaking the monotonous flow of the exposition, which I must add is not really boring per se, merely if there was too much of it you would tire quite quickly. 

Following the examples and brief explanations of what each example is doing and how it’s doing it, there is a series of small exercises the reader can choose to do, bringing a nice interactive element to the book and changing the whole reading experience really, for the better too it has to be said. What I really liked about this book was this part as it lifts the book from the realms of just reading about something to actually creating something so at the end of the whole experience there is a physical goal that has been achieved. 

Following the exercises is a brief, concluding section that ties the chapter together, leaving the reader with further ideas of what they can do with the fruits of the exercises and what the next step is before moving along to the next area of study. 

The book itself is written nice and simply, it’s very accessible and if you’re interested in engaging yourself in a bit of fiction writing, I would recommend this book as a guide because it gets heart and soul of the art across really well. As an added bonus, the last chapter is devoted to the ways to go about submitting a manuscript and putting your writing out into the universe, so everything about this book proves practical.