Voice & Style (Elements of Fiction Writing)

Rating:
Summary: Misses its audience
Review: I tried to read this book with an open mind, and it's clearly a book only an English lit teacher could love.

Given the book's target audience - beginning writers - it falls far short of being helpful to them. What the book SHOULD do and doesn't is present the broad concepts and principles, and then if the author chooses to "instruct by example" as Payne does, then provide examples that support and illustrate those concepts and principles.

Instead each chapter jumps into a seemingly endless stream of analysis of fiction works, attempting to instruct by way of example with no real "how-to's." The overwhelming problems - besides a tendency toward pedantic wordiness - are that the snippets used are too short and the analyses too specific to be useful to the target audience of this book: beginning writers looking for the broader principles to apply to their own writing.

Each chapter is followed by exercises. However, the exercises are not presented with the goals for each ("WHY am I doing this") or any way of analyzing or learning from the results after doing them ("WHAT worked when I did this"). Beginning writers could finish this book feeling as I did - somewhat confused and very much like I wasted my time.

I would highly recommend "Finding Your Writer's Voice" by Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall instead.

Rating:
Summary: Rating the Elements of Fiction Writing series
Review: I've read all the books in the Elements of Fiction Writing series and this is how I'd rank them.

"Scene & Structure" "Characters & Viewpoint" "Beginnings, Middles & Ends"

The above three books are invaluable -- must reads. They are the best of the series, in my opinion, and are packed with good information on every page. Well-done.

"Conflict, Action & Suspense" "Description" "Plot" "Manuscript Submission" "Setting"

The above five books are good, solid reads. Again, they contain good information and cover the subject decently.

"Voice & Style" "Dialogue"

To me, the last two books need to be rewritten. They are by far the weakest of the series. Both suffer from an annoying style, particularly Dialogue, and both are very skimpy on real information. Neither one is very helpful.

This is the order in which I'd recommend reading them.

Rating:
Summary: Ironies
Review: Within scant minutes of starting into Johnny Payne's treatment of Voice and Style, I have had to add the book to the pile of items being returned to the library. Why? In a 4-page discussion of Voice and Irony, Payne analyzes the technique he himself used in a novella entitled, The Ambassador's Son. The discussion might be germane were it not that Payne apparently did not do adequate research for the original work. For instance, he describes a Mr. Featherson as the "Peruvian ambassador." However, Mr. Featherson is not at all "Peruvian"-the last name alone would suggest otherwise-but an American in a foreign culture. Perhaps Payne intends Mr. Featherson to be the American ambassador to Peru?
Furthermore, it doesn't sound as though Payne has met many ambassadors. He describes how Mr. Featherson blatantly ignored health warnings about the dangers of eating shellfish and invited his son to try some at a local restaurant. That would be ludicrous: foreign service families take cholera warnings very seriously, and Peru is notorious for a high cholera rate.
Mr. Featherson displays other non-ambassadorial behavior as well, including sloppy deportment in a restaurant and excessive drinking: in reality, American emissaries and their families are extremely conscious of their public behavior because of its potential to reflect poorly on the US. After all, they serve their country, not as Payne seems to think, to impose American culture on a foreign environment (that was the old colonial agenda), but to facilitate exchange and communication.
In short, Payne undermines the very topic he is trying to illuminate: authority. To have authority one has to know what one is talking about, and if one doesn't know, one had better research!