The other thing is that a lot of the books that I’ve read have very
similar advice in them, so much so that sometimes I gloss over the words as I’m
going over them, and I know that that’s a great sin when it comes to reading,
but if I’ve read the same thing a hundred times before, telling me one more
time won’t make it sink in any more than it already has…
So when a book comes along with the legend that it’s a guide for
creating imaginative fiction, so not just fiction, but imaginative fiction, well, get a lighter and call me petrol…
A word on the various books that I’ve read before I come to the book
itself, I have a rule when it comes to books about writing, they have to be
written by someone who’s actually
written something other than the book about writing. In todays age of self published books and
everyone who ever thought they were any good giving advice about everything
that their family ever told them they were good at, I tend to veer towards
those with a proven track record rather than those who believe that because
they have Internets, they must automatically be an authority on whatever they
write about…
The author of this particular book is Jeff Vandemeer, three times
winner of the World Fantasy Award and a variety of other things that I could
spend some time on explaining, but suffice it to say that he’s done enough to
be taken seriously, which was the first reason for buying the book.
The second was the front cover…
Shallow?
Maybe, but that’s what we start with, and you never get a second chance
at a first impression, so the cover is something that’s got to get your
attention.
It got mine…
When the blurb on the book says that it’s illustrated, it’s really not
kidding, there’s artwork on every second page at the bare minimum, and it’s not
the usual sort of thing where it’s an image immediately recognisable as being
something that you can associate with the topic at hand, but instead something
that takes the concept of what’s being talked about and expresses it in a way
that compliments the subject being talked about.
As an Example, the lifecycle of a story…
And so it is with most of the book, there’s a colossal amount of
artwork in here, articles from a number of very well known writers, and a whole
bunch of exercises in writing as well as explanations of different styles and
finding the narrative voice that you write with, rather than trying to force
you into copying the style of those you read.
Now here’s the point where it gets interesting, if you read it as an
occasional dip in to get inspiration or find a way to get around what you’re
stuck with at the moment, it will fail.
This book is designed to be read and read properly, in the way that many
writers don’t do because they’re too busy trying to write.
So if you don’t read, don’t
pick this book up in the first place, it’ll give you a few ideas, but the meat
of the subject matter will be lost, particularly when you get to the last
section that gives you things to do that require that you’ve actually read the entire book before it…
If, however, you do read, the
book is divided up into a number of sections, each of them geared towards a
particular aspect of writing. I’m not
going to list them, because there are some out there who’d do exactly what I do
in these matters and go “Ah, but I’ve got a book that talks about them already,
so I don’t need this book.”, and to do that would be to forgo the pleasure of
this particular book, and that is the colourful way in which it presents the
issues and answers the questions.
Colourful?
Yes, because the key here is that most writers see things in
words. If you put a wall of text in
front of us, we’ll eat it for breakfast, never once wondering about the words
that we’ve eaten and not giving further thought beyond the meanings of the individual
words. However, give us something that presents words as something other than a
thing to be read and it engages the rest of our non-text head, which in turns
engages the creative wheels that a lot of us don’t use because we see
everything as words. That’s what I got
out of this book, more than anything else.
Someone else’s perspective…
I’ve read On Writing by
Stephen King, I’ve read How to write
Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card, both books that were
excellent in their advice and told in a no nonsense manner that gave me the
building blocks on how to get writing in the first instance when I’d previously
had no discipline, but this book gave me the impetus to reach beyond my normal
inspiration and look to things that previously I’d had no interest in. To see beyond my normal perspectives and
consider why I write the way I write, not just how I write, has been a very
interesting exercise and one that I have every intention of continuing with…
The only proviso about this book is that it’s easy to get lost in, and
while that may not seem to be a bad thing, remember that it’s a book for
writers, and while it’s good to read…
