Reddit reviews The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing: Everything You Need to Know-From Plot to Published - 4th Edition - Completely Revised & Updated

Bookshelf time! Books are expensive, but the holidays are coming up, and that's a decent excuse to buy a present for a writer on your list or yourself.

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If you want to get pumped about writing a novel, get Write Your Novel from the Middle by James Scott Bell. It's a short, easy read, ~100 pages, and the ebook is $4; put that on your phone and you can read it in a couple afternoons. Bell's premise is there's a place in the middle of most great books where the main character has to take a hard look in the mirror. Nail this scene in your head and the rest of the plot forwards and backwards falls into place.

If it turns out you like James Scott Bell, his Plot and Structure is a great lesson on how a story is constructed. We all have these pieces of stories in our heads, and it's sometimes hard to know where they would fit in a story, how they come together to make a story. Understanding how a story is put together is critical.

How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James Frey is another good book to get you pumped. It is a modern classic. If you have one book on your writing bookshelf, this is probably the one I would recommend.


Writing Active Hooks by Mary Buckham seems a bit esoteric here, but I've personally found this essential. I wrote for years as an amateur and even took classes in writing, and no one told me about active hooks or about how important they are. I had to stumble upon the concept by accident. Basically, a hook is a convention or tool you use to grab and then hold your reader's attention. It's how some authors keep you awake and reading at 1 a.m. You want this in your toolbox.

All the previous books here are applicable to all genre fiction, but Randy Ellefson's excellent worldbuilding duo Creating Places and Creating Life are relevant to speculative fiction in particular. Creating Places covers creating planets, geology and mapmaking, systems of government, systems of travel and backstory. Creating Life takes you through creating species, famous persons, monsters and biology.

I'm also going to include Evan Marshall's The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing. Every successful writer has to figure out their own method or procedure for creating finished stories, and ultimately you have to put the pieces together yourself; no one can do it for you. And personally, I find Marshall's plan to be too restrictive. But if you've been trying for years to put it all together and can't, Marshall might be able to help. He is very strict about what you can and can't do, but if you follow his instructions step by step, you'll end up writing a novel. One thing I find interesting is the projected length of your novel determines how many POV characters you're going to use, and he has formulas for how many chapters to allocate to each POV character. If you write with multiple POVs, it's worth your while to have a look.