How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to avoid at All Costs if you Ever Want to Get Published".

Non-fiction: "How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to avoid at All Costs if you Ever Want to Get Published".

I picked this up in the library and simply couldn't put it down -- it's basically the insider's guide (written from the commissioning editor's point of view) to all the common issues that send unsolicited manuscripts straight into the slush-pile, but it's also funny enough to make its guidance memorable.

Each issue gets a TV Tropes-style label, e.g. The List of Ingredients substituting for description ("The living room contained a sofa, an armchair and a television set with built-in DVD player on a purpose-built stand. It had two windows, with curtains that were open. It was carpeted"), The Crepuscular Handbag where the author uses words he doesn't properly understand ("Henderson toyed with the onset of Melinda's bikin, ruminating his designs. "Asleep so soon?" he whickered. Of course he was vigilant that this sleep was the due of the unsavoury drug he had slavered in her drink prior to the debarking of his private schooner boat") or The Hothouse Plant who is wildly over-sensitive to every passing event: ("Could you get that?" he called. I trembled at his harsh tone, remembering times when he had only spoken to me in the timbre of love. The phone was blaring, shrieking, jangling my already raw nerves. "Hello! I'm calling from A-1 Rug Cleaners and I have a very special offer--" My heart was seized with bitter cold as I listened to the droning voice. The world had become so cruel, so impersonal. Where was the community? Where was the compassion?")

And despite the title, all too much of the advice is of course relevant to fan-fiction, or to any other amateur writing; it's often a pretty good explanation of *why* things aren't working when you can't quite put your finger on it. I think I've witnessed most of these 200 mistakes emerging on FFnet at one time or another; the problems I recognise from my own writing are lack of description (The Man of Average Height as versus The Joan Rivers Pre-Novel Description) and Men of Inaction ("a wildly disproportionate ratio of inner contemplation to action") plus The Waiting Room, in which "the writer churns out endless scenes establishing background information with no main story in sight"...

Not all of this applies to fan-fiction in the same way that it does to commercial novels, of course (we can be reasonably certain that the audience already knows what our characters look like, for one thing, and we can get away, if we want, with inserting a single vignette into an existing scenario rather than needing to hook the readers into page-turning plot... but by and large the book lists most of the things that go horribly wrong with stories in an entertaining format that doesn't hurt anybody's pride, the examples given being so blatantly contrived.

One reviewer describes it as prime lavatory reading material, which given the pick-up-and-put-down format is certainly true -- provided you *can* put it down, which I couldn't!

http://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0061357952/