Write Fearless. Edit Smart. Get Published: A Master Class for Fiction Writers

This intermittently helpful guide from Mangum (After Hello), a YA novelist and editor at Shadow Mountain, breaks down how to write a novel from inception to publication. She distills advice from her experiences as an author, as when she encourages readers to overcome writer’s block by setting deadlines and recounts how rushing to finish the second novel in her Hourglass Door series in four months didn’t give her time to second-guess herself. The emphasis on rigid processes and requirements can make the early stages of writing feel like a box-checking exercise. For instance, the story “formula” suggests narratives should feature at least two characters who each have high-stakes goals, motivations “greater than whatever adversity they might encounter,” and a relationship with each other, and Mangum recommends diagramming characters’ relationships to determine likely points of conflict. This systematic approach is better suited to the editing and submission processes, for which she exhorts readers to check for pacing and flow by asking whether the main character moves the plot forward in each chapter, and to start a query letter with a simple “X + Y tagline” (Stephen King’s Cujo might be described as “Jaws with paws.”) Though the writing advice can feel reductive, this has enough nuggets of wisdom on editing and finding an agent to make it worth aspiring novelists’ time. (Nov.)