This evening, I had a consultation with a young author, who'd asked for feedback on his novella in progress, a kind of bildungsroman in which a Boston boy tries to figure out how to be a man. Good pacing, realistic dialogue; not bad, all told!
I did encourage him to work on tuning his prose style, making it more specifically his own -- to shake off the generic. The narrative and the characters all work, but now the sentences need to be recognizably his.
I had the idea of calling up examples from some recent best-sellers, to show him how three authors who aren't trying to turn verbal somersaults nonetheless create effects that belong distinctly to the genre they're working in. For a touch of poetic flair, I told him -- look at Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. For a clear trade fiction style with a hint of noir, Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train. And finally, for a kind of unabashed sentimentality, Jojo Moyes, Me Before You.
Here's a trick of the trade, if you want to learn from the prose style of best-selling books that you don't happen to have on your shelf at this morning. Go to the Goodreads pages for each of the books you're interested in. There, you'll find there a compilation of reader-favorited excerpts.
Thanks to Goodreads, I was able to source a quick list of exemplary sentences for my author friend. I sent him away not just with recommendations that he check those three books out, but with a typed sheet of illustrative examples that he can readily look over and learn from as he prepares to go over his own book manuscript for an extra polish.
I did encourage him to work on tuning his prose style, making it more specifically his own -- to shake off the generic. The narrative and the characters all work, but now the sentences need to be recognizably his.
I had the idea of calling up examples from some recent best-sellers, to show him how three authors who aren't trying to turn verbal somersaults nonetheless create effects that belong distinctly to the genre they're working in. For a touch of poetic flair, I told him -- look at Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. For a clear trade fiction style with a hint of noir, Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train. And finally, for a kind of unabashed sentimentality, Jojo Moyes, Me Before You.
Here's a trick of the trade, if you want to learn from the prose style of best-selling books that you don't happen to have on your shelf at this morning. Go to the Goodreads pages for each of the books you're interested in. There, you'll find there a compilation of reader-favorited excerpts.
Thanks to Goodreads, I was able to source a quick list of exemplary sentences for my author friend. I sent him away not just with recommendations that he check those three books out, but with a typed sheet of illustrative examples that he can readily look over and learn from as he prepares to go over his own book manuscript for an extra polish.
- ZB
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