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Tough Neighborhoods

There are hundreds of good books that explain how to write. Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages is different. It explains how to write so that your work doesn't get rejected. Lukeman's approach is methodical and practical, beginning with presentation and working through common blunders with modifiers, style, dialogue, point of view, characters, tone, focus and pacing.

The odds are against every manuscript that arrives on the desk of an editor or an agent. The chances of your manuscript getting mugged while it's there and sent home in disgrace are very high. But what if you could know what your prospective agent is going to think about your manuscript before you sent it off? What if you could look through the eyes of the editor you want to impress?

Lukeman can't quite give you those mystical powers, but he does the next best thing -- he explains the common flaws in every manuscript that give editors and agents a valid reason to reject them.

Editors and agents are overwhelmed by paperwork, and can't devote hours of thought to each manuscript. So most use a "read to reject" method: they read the first few pages with an eye toward its errors in setting, characterization, dialogue, or style. Any error in those first pages is likely to be fatal.

As a writer, you probably know what good writing is, and you try your best to produce it. But the people who judge your work -- and who decide whether or not your manuscript is going to be published -- have different criteria. Lukeman explains what those criteria are, and then shows how to fix your manuscript before it goes in the mail.

Lukeman illustrates his advice with glaring examples of bad writing, and this is the one weakness of "The First Five Pages." His examples are comically awful, so crude that they lose their effectiveness as instructional models. The book would have benefitted from examples of more subtle writing flaws that might have given readers a chance for deeper analysis. Let's hope for a sequel, perhaps even a workbook with more challenging and thoughtful review of the kinds of errors that even quite talented writers could make.

Apart from that weakness, though, The First Five Pages is an excellent resource that writers should keep on their shelves. The chapters on repairing dialogue (including "informative," "commonplace," "melodramatic" and "hard to follow") are especially fine, full of insights that I haven't seen elsewhere.

And even though his task is to explain all the things that writers do wrong, it's clear that Lukeman genuinely likes us and understands what makes us keep writing, even in the face of repeated rejection.

Tough Neighborhoods, Next. . .
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