Creative Writer's Style Guide: Rules and Advice for Writing Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

Rating:
Summary: Do you need another style guide?
Review: Every writer has (or SHOULD have!) Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" on their shelf, so why do you need another style guide? Well, for one thing Strunk doesn't have references to Limp Bizkit or the September 11 attacks. This is a new book with reference to pop culture and more modern writing methods and styles. The rest of it is the same as any other good style guide, but the parts devoted to nuances of creative fiction and topics of interest to writers of today are worth the price of the book. You don't find many style guides that discuss the pros and cons of peppering your dialogue with realistic use of obscenities and profanity - something worth thinking about.

Keep Strunk and White within arm's reach by your dictionary and thesaurus, but make a spot for this book somewhere on your writing shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Useful, useful, useful.
Review: It's just another style guide, right?

You won't think so after reading it, and refering to it, and wearing out its jacket and not giving a darn.

This is not your English teacher's grammar guide. It's for YOU, the writer.

Part I is dedicated to grammar issues as they apply to the creative writer. Part II dedicated to issues of style.

Both parts are valuable. It's a great refresher course in usage, and it's the first one I've ever read that hasn't made me feel as though I were doing homework. If only I could have had it in my hands that time on the dentist's operating chair when he yanked my back left molar. It's so much easier a read than pulling teeth, and it can make you forget the pains of the real world. And it absolutely beats that grueling pain of suddenly feeling lost, while writing, as you come to a who/whom sentence construction . . . or, for this matter, to a question of properly typing ellipses.

I improved the technical aspects of my prose after reading this book. I knew better how to discover my mistakes, and I knew better how to break the rules. I broke those rules with confidence, consciously. Just the same, I learned when breaking the rules was not effective.

I've used The Creative Writer's Style Guide time and time again. It won't collect dust on your bookshelf.