The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Volume 1: Building Blocks [Hardcover]

I put this book to use the very same week I bought it. One of my creative writing students at the local university where I teach was having problems writing dialogue. When I met with him, I brought along my "Building Blocks" book. In addition to what I had to say, it was great to offer him the advice of some of my favorite writers, including Charles Baxter, Amy Bloom and Dick Bausch. I felt as though I was leading him down the corridors of the ultimate English department, and every door was open.

The excerpts are golden nuggets of writing wisdom: short, conversational and enlightening. I'll definitely consider using this book as a required course text in the future. It covers everything I need to address in my writing class: point of view, voice, place and setting, character, description, use of language, dialogue, etc. - without sounding repetitive or pedantic. The variety of voices, perspectives, interviews and excerpts keep the topics interesting and fresh.

As a writer myself, I've found that the book offers more than just "building blocks." I turn to the book when I'm feeling stuck, and when I need to get a fresh perspective on the craft. It's often helpful to remind myself that even the best writers experience roadblocks and frustrations. Unlike a lot of books on writing, this one tells it like it is, while at the same time offering helpful strategies and techniques -- from writing a novel for the first time to paragraph breaks and punctuation.

I have read many books on writing fiction, mostly because I am inspired by reading about the creative process. The reason I love this book is that its breadth and variety provide a hundred little windows into the craft of story-telling. Somehow, it's refreshing to see that the experience of writing fiction is wildly different for different people; there's simply not a right or wrong way to approach the work.

As other reviews have said, this would be a terrific book both for students of fiction and for practicing writers who need occasional fresh perspectives. I've shared my copy with my daughter, a teenage writer who is absorbing all she can about the nuts and bolts of writing stories; we both enjoy reading it in bits.

The subtitle ("Guide to Writing Fiction") is a bit deceiving, because this led me to believe that the book was technically oriented, when it is actually emotionally oriented.

If you're a writer, you've probably discovered that all writing problems can be placed into one of two main categories:
1 - Emotional
2 - Technical

Emotional problems are things like, "I can't write and I want to. I need to find time, but I can't. What should I write about? Should I use a #2 pencil and a legal pad, or a word processor?"

Books can't help with much of this, but a lot of writing books try to, and they usually fall flat.

Technical problems are problems related to understanding what to write, when you want to show that your character is angry. How to plot a twelve chapter book. What details do you show or not show and how do you determine which is which.

I was expecting this book to be more of a technical treatise, but it fell flat for me, because it was more about the emtions of how a specific (interviewee) author felt when he wrote something that went on to be published. Does that really help me? No.

The entire book is made up of interviews (originally published in glimmer train's magazine for writers). However, to break up the book into "story elements" - setting, character, viewpoint, etc - the authors had to break up the interviews, so only the piece speaking of character are found in that chapter. So, often, you find one piece of the interview in chapter 1 and another piece in chapter 4 and yet another in chapter 5. Terribly disjointed and makes the reading quite boring.

One last thing. Many times I failed to even find the element (character, setting, viewpoint) exposed in the pieces.

Here's a example of what the book is like. If the item is supposed to be about viewpoint, the interviewer would say something like:
"What made you choose 1st person for this story?"
The answer would come something like:
"Well, I was in the bathroom shaving and the light bulb blew. As I turned to leave and get a new bulb I slipped and bumped my head on the toilet. That's when I knew I had to write this story from my point of view."

Uh, yeah. That's a ton of help.
I'm looking for something that teaches writing.
I'd see an answer like:
"This character was so quirky that I wanted the reader to be inside his head 100% of the time. I wanted to challenge the reader to see that the 1st person character was actually a bit lopsided, something like The Catcher in The Rye. It works because we see the world through his eyes and everything seems right, until we find out he is a bit imbalanced."
And then some teaching on how to do first-person.
Maybe something like: Have the character see his reflection in a pond. Have someone say something to the character about his blue eyes seeming brighter on a specific day.

Here are some books that do teach this way:
Elements of Writing Fiction - Scene & Structure (Elements of Fiction Writing)

Make Your Words Work: Proven Techniques for Effective Writing-For Fiction and Nonfiction

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