Sol Stein

Professional secrets from a renowned editor, prize-winning author, and award-winning instructor make this book the #1 practical choice for fiction and nonfiction writers of all levels of experience.

A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

Stein On Writing

Artas Bartas

"Great, yet another book on writing," I thought to myself as I picked up Sol Stein's book, "How many of these can a market sustain?" But now that I've read the book, I keep on thinking that if I read this book at 18, it could have propelled my life in a completely different - more literary - direction. 

What makes this book so different from many others, is Stein's conviction that writing is a social undertaking. As an author, you are always writing a book FOR SOMEONE, which means you have to accept a set of social constraints or resign yourself to remaining a marginal author. Here are just some of them: create characters worth an emotional investment, adopt a cinematic pace, narrate a story from a consistent perspective. 

According to Stein, the art of becoming a good writer lies in mastering short, concise descriptions, populating your writing with fascinating characters, endowing their actions with compelling emotional logic, and structuring the story as a sequence of immediate scenes moving the action further. If all this sounds familiar, it's because many successful authors advocate for the same set of rules (I'm following James Patterson's course on writing on Masterclass who offers very similar advice). 

What Stein does differently, however, is ground these rules in human psychology and readers' expectations. "Readers don't read novels in order to experience the boredom they often experience in life," he says when explaining the need for creating compelling characters. "Our instinct as human beings is to provide answers, to ease tension. As writers our job is the opposite, to create tension and not dispel it immediately," he notes when discussing ways of propelling the plot. 

Stein's view of writing as a social activity also manifests in another way: he is keenly aware of the need to accompany his advice with plenty of good examples, lest his general advice is misinterpreted. The chapter entitled "How to show instead of tell" is one of my favorite ones, because it uses two dozens examples to illustrate the workings of the literary adage. As Stein notes, "He was nervous" tells, while "He tapped his fingers on the tabletop" shows. 

Oh, and if you are expecting a dry, academic book, don't! Sol Stein has an excellent sense of humor filling the book with more laugh-out-loud passages than a full-length Adam Sandler movie. Yet, in the end it's Stein's willingness to shine a light on the inner workings of publishing houses that makes "On Writing" such a page-turner. Understanding why editors favor a certain type of books, how to navigate erotic scenes, and what makes non-fiction writing tick is fascinating. Seeing how that can affect your chances of being published - enlightening. And Sol Stein is never shy for sharing these insights.

To conclude, next time you see someone struggling to compose an essay or aching to write a novel, give them this book as a present. It will make a world of difference.

Stein On Writing A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

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