Crash Course

Wow.  I had no idea how much I would learn about writing over the weekend!

I took my Kindle to the beach intending to read the second book of a series and was flipping through my choices (I'd also brought a book by Jane Austen, a play by Oscar Wilde, and an old favorite by Kenneth Grahame) when I realized I had about seven books on writing still waiting for me to read through them.  I'd gotten them free as some promotion a while back but had barely skimmed through them.

I started in on the one I'd actually started ages ago, and I sank deeper and deeper into the nuts and bolts of crafting a story until I had to come back up for breath.

Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Your Readers At Page One and Never Lets Them Go by Les Edgerton is a phenomenal behind-the-scenes tell all about story crafting.  I'm halfway through and have taken dozens of notes and scribbled down things about my story that occur to me while puzzling through this book.

While my subconscious grasps the correct (and incorrect) way of writing from the fiction books I'm reading, my conscious could never process and put into words what I was learning.  Hooked is a brilliant exposition on what makes a story tick and is written so that my conscious and subconscious connect and work together in creating better writing.

I cannot begin to say how thankful I am for this book.  If the last half is as instructional as the first, I will be miles and miles ahead of where I was just a few months ago.

It's like learning in a well-lit classroom as opposed to trying to figure out how to build something in the dark.