Rating: 
Summary: Get this book
Review: NO exclamation mark needed. This book is better than the over-rated (at least in my opinion) Strunk & Whites's Elements of Style that everyone seems to recommend . Self Editing for Fiction Writers is small, but it has everything in it that larger books often attempt to cover, but fail. Kudos to the authors for including "answers" to writing exercises. Don't be scared off by the "editing" word in the title--you're not just taking a red pencil and adding and taking out commas! Oh my no! You may be given an exercise from scratch as well as working with rough drafts and at the back of the book you get to see how the authors approached the exercise. This book along with Immediate Fiction (which also gives "answers" to exercises) and Sin & Syntax are wonderful writing books. I don't know how many times when I've edited other writer's work that I've said: "Do you have self-editing for Fiction Writers?" because I know if they had, they would do more show than telling, use less adverbs, beats, and indirection in dialogue. You spend a lot of time sweating out your work, so splurge and get this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Help for Fiction Writers
Review: The techniques that Renni and Dave offer will benefit both beginning and experienced writers. They give practical advice as well motivate writers to do their best work. Anyone interested in writing a saleable book should add this book to their collection. Read it once to get helpful information. Then go out and write your novel or story. After a while come back and read Self-Editing a second time. You will find that there is even more to be gained from reading the book the second time.
Rating:
Summary: Next best thing to a writing mentor.
Review: This little book has come in handy for me as a writer, reviewer, and manuscript evaluator. I refer to its checklists often, and I wish more first-time authors would do the same. I'd be wading through far fewer adverbs, point of view slips, unnecessary speaker attributions, and expository passages if they did.However, as helpful as it is, I think that it should be used in conjunction with other reference manuals. A "planning your novel" guide and a book about copy editing would round out the most basic writing library. (Authors who prefer to write in a specific genre should be sure their "how-to" handbook is tailored to it.) Also, there's no substitute for live feedback. "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" is wonderful for training people to catch mistakes in their stories, but it's still easy to miss a few problem areas every now and then. Even so, I'd far rather work with a beginning author who has read this handy little compendium than one who has not yet discovered it, since having common knowledge of it puts us "on the same page" when it comes to discussing their writing.
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