I'm looking for recommendations for specific types of books about writing fiction and structuring a novel. I'm doing a content read for a friend who wants to write a novel (I think it's YA, but honestly, at this point I can't tell) and is just...not a good writer. The type of help I'm looking for is different from the usual writery type stuff, so please take a look at the details inside.
My friend has self-published two memoir type books, and I did copyedits for them both (I'm a freelance editor, mostly focused these days on copyediting and proofreading). They were...challenging, because I didn't want to discourage her, but she is just very much not a born writer, and while she goes to conferences and tries to learn about writing skills, she doesn't seem to really make the connection between people talking about, say, how to do good dialog and writing dialog that's not horribly stilted, exposition-dumpy, and unrealistic.
She's now trying to make a switch to fiction. I believe she sees this as YA, but that's not a thing I know much about, and I haven't been doing much in the way of content editing or developmental editing for like a decade or so, and I'm out of the loop.
Because I've been writing myself since I was a child, I've never really paid a lot of attention to how to write books. I've read a few, hate many of the ones that get recommended all the time (seriously, do not tell me I should never use adverbs Famous Writer Man, wtf), and just basically haven't needed to know good ones to recommend to a wannabe fiction writer. Most of my clients write fiction, but they are all experienced and most of them don't really have any recs, either. And when I work with publishers, the editors take care of steering the rewrites.
So I'm looking for books that I could recommend to my friend that might help her understand stuff like structure (for instance, this manuscript started with an interesting inciting incident, and then just...petered out in the second chapter), narrative pacing, and especially how to write engaging dialog. (She seems to want to try to explain everything--literally everything--up front rather than building the story through action and narrative or struggles with how to have a first-person narrator learn about stuff without it being an exposition dump from another character.)
I specifically don't want stuff like Anne Lamott, or Stephen King's book, or Strunk & White, or anything focused on writers ruminating on writing or focusing on mechanics. My friend is super analytical, and I think she struggles with how to convey emotion through narration or develop direction (I'm 70 pages into this thing and I have no idea what it's about, as an example). Books (or websites) that really give a newbie concrete help on understanding how to create a compelling story are what I need. When I was poking around on the web, everything I came across was focused on details that I don't think would be helpful.
tl;dr: Basically, something that tells someone who can't write all that well how to write better and take an interesting idea and create a compelling story, with useful examples. |
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