- Home
- GENERAL NON-FICTION REVIEWS
- A Novel Approach To Writing Your First Novel, (Or Your Best One) Reviewed By Namta Gupta of Bookpleasures.com
A Novel Approach To Writing Your First Novel, (Or Your Best One) Reviewed By Namta Gupta of Bookpleasures.com
- By Namta Gupta
- Published November 21, 2014
- GENERAL NON-FICTION REVIEWS
Namta Gupta
Reviewer Namta Gupta:
Namta is a senior journalist based in New Delhi, India and has been
covering news in all its form for past 5 years. An MA in English and
Human Rights she is an avid reader and loves every piece of fiction
and non-fiction that she can lay her hands on.
Author: Jack Woodville London
Publisher: Vire Press LLC, September 2014
ISBN-10: 0990612104 : ISBN-13: 978-0990612100
The
title of the book is pretty much self-explanatory and the book is
written to aid a writer either writing his first book or his best
one. Coming to the review, the points that the writer explains are
succinct, lucid and practical but some of them, despite seeming to be
too obvious, are often overlooked by writers when they are writing
the book/draft.
The author of this book, Jack Woodville London, gives
several examples right from the passages of Jane Eyre to Spies of the
Balkans to highlight his points. I won’t give out much because it
would be injustice to this book but I can at least say that there are
several references, passages and anecdotes liberally put to use by
the writer to drive home his points. This approach, proving his claim
via book passages, certainly hooks a reader more and also makes him
aspire to reach the stature of the great masters whom the readers,
writers and budding writers look up to.
Then author’s stress on
doing research and how to approach writing will make a writer’s
life pretty easy because often, as the author himself highlighted, a
writer may have a terrific story to tell but in the absence of good
research and solid language even the best of efforts may bite the
dust. And this happens too often particularly with self-publishing
and indie authors as they are often devoid of good teams to aid them
in their research. As far as the book goes it is a great asset for a
budding writer and those who wish to take their skills to the next
level, but having said this let me concede, that this book is not dry
at all! It is actually engrossing and commands a reader’s attention
so well that one wouldn’t want to move away before reading the
entire text! It helps that the book is not too bulky (75 pages!) so
no one can deny that the editing of the book is terrific.
If you are a writer worth your salt then certainly it is the editing that you would end up admiring the most, besides of course the language, which is easy to understand. So although the author has his target readership as authors or would be authors but I would say that this book is beyond this segment and in fact covers a much wider segment of ‘how-to’ books that drive most sales these days.