Reddit reviews Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (9th Edition)

That's right. I think the most common way I've heard that is by comparing learning writing to learning music? Like, you have to learn your scales before you can start playing Bach or whomever. (I'm not actually a musician so I don't know how good of a comparison that is.)

If you aren't looking for feedback, ignore the following paragraph. I thought how the original post was written was clear enough already. I just had a thought I figured I'd share:

You might consider using examples of whatever concept you're talking about from published stories. There's a book called Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Barroway that's structured this way: they'll address a concept like characterization, talk about it in the abstract for a little while, give some more concrete advice, then they usually end with a couple examples pulled from actual, published stories. Maybe that would help shift some of the burden from coming up with your own, single line examples that people can get up in arms about, to just finding whole paragraphs/scenes so there's more context? That, and people generally seem less interested in arguing with published work.

But setting that aside, I'm glad you tackled an obviously controversial topic. I guess reddit just isn't keen on being told what to do, even when you're just giving suggestions and explaining terms, not actually telling them what to do. I hope there's more of these craft-focused Pubtips.

I know it's not explicitly geared for short stories but The Nighttime Novelist is my go-to text for how to think about structuring a larger work. Though I have yet to publish my first novel.

Short story writing is very different. Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction and Stephen King's On Writing are both wonderful craft books that shed some of the practicalities of the Nighttime Novelist and look a good writing in its simplest form.

Much more important than nonfiction books, though, is finding short story markets you'd like to read. Figure out what kind of place might accept the most perfect form of the fiction you'd like to write, and then read those magazines religiously. While you're reading, do what you can to consider what these stories are doing well and how they are pulling off what they are pulling off. Use the vocabulary learned from craft books to better articulate (to yourself, mostly) what these stories are really doing, and begin to generate a sense of what good writing looks like. Then practice, practice, practice, write, revise, and write some more until you've got something worth sending out.

At this point in your writing development, the name of the game is simply learning to write well--keep that in mind, and try to make decisions based on what will help you become a better writer. And finally remember, there is such a thing as "practicing well."

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Here are your smile-ified links:

On Writing Well

Elements of Style

Thrill Me

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

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I think I disagree, but guess I haven't read a ton of books about writing. In my experience, they can be helpful, especially to people who are just starting out. Maybe not as helpful as reading the types of books that you want to write (and reading the stuff you don't want to write—it's important to read widely), but I don't know if I'd call them a waste of time. King's book is great (but that might be because I got the impression that I'd like him as a person while I was reading that), Strunk and White Elements of Style and Zissner's On Writing Well are helpful for tightening beginners' prose, Writing Fiction: a guide to narrative craft has great exercises at the end of every chapter, and I'm reading Benjamin Percy's essay collection Thrill Me right now, and it's great. I feel like a large part of /r/writing would really connect with the first and titular essay in that collection, actually. He talks about reading a lot of so-called trash genre fiction before being exposed to literary fiction and how he kind of overcorrected and became a super-fierce advocate for that-and-only-that before he realized that you can take the good parts of both to create amazing stories. I've also never read any other respected literary person mention reading R. A. Salvatore, which was cool to see since I forgot I was a big Drizzt fan when I was younger.