Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Dwight V. Swain

Book Overview

This book provides solid instruction for persons who want to write and sell fiction, not just to talk and study about it. It gives the background, insights, and specific procedures needed by all... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806111917
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.7" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Wow!!!! Absolutely Mind Blowing!!!!

This book is about YOU, about what excites YOU as a writer. Are you worried there wont be a single soul willing to read your books and the subjects you choose for them? Don't worry! IF YOU DARE TO WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU LIKE, YOU WILL REACH THOUSANDS OF READERS WHO WILL BE MORE THAN HAPPY TO BUY YOUR BOOKS. There is a very simple reason for this, just search it in the book. "Techniques of the selling writer" is a MUST for you the aspiring writer and it is also for the not-quite-there-yet professional writer. Really, as I read it I could not believe how this author managed to get so much valuable advice in so few pages (330 p.). The title might stir two feelings in you: you are either interested because you want to become the next Stephen King and make money, or you are inmediately discouraged because you want to become a respected fiction artist and money isn't your business. Either way if you read this book you will be steps closer to your goal. So, this book does not tell you what subjects you need to write about. It is about building a bridge between you and YOUR audience. It is about how to build a good story, and how to tell it in an exciting original manner. Reader's emotions, writer's freedom, story success, climax, conflict, vividness, passion, pleasure, tension, satisfaction, confidence, the writer's life... I just read this book and I'm very excited about it. If you read my other reviews you'll see that I have read many books on writing fiction, and the more I read the more difficult I am to please. I get more picky and I can quickly distinguish between absolute garbage and pure genius! What impresses me most of this book is that for a long time I've had questions about how to build a story, how to use point of view, how to stir emotions in the reader, how to build the climax. I have had to search for this info in different books. But in "Techniques of the selling writer" you will find very insigthfull comments about all this topics. Also I noticed he mention a very subtle yet extremely important aspect with regard to world building. I was very excited when I read it. It was like adding a missing piece of the complex puzzle of story telling. Also he has some comments that sound like zen for writers and I really liked them. There is something you might find odd with this book. You see the title has the word "SELLING", so you might expect a great deal of advice on how to sell your work. NOPE. The chapter "Selling your stories" in less than a page long. Still, it contains probably the most important and still very common sense advice on how to sell your stories. No marketing tricks, no sophisticated selling gimmicks... Just three simple steps that you need to follow during your entire writing life. I'm so happy I bought it! Every time I buy a how-to fiction book I fear. I fear it might not be good. After all I have read some pretty good books but sometimes I have also had the terrible experience of buying lousy books. But wh

This book got me published

Although Swain's book was originally published in 1965, there's a very good reason why it's still in print. The information he presents is solid, useful and timeless.The book has 10 chapters. The first, Fiction and You, tells what the writer needs to know and gives common traps writers fall into. Then he discusses things like rules and the creative act of writing. His style is terse and sentences are short. That makes it easy to find specific information when you go back later to look for it.In the second chapter he gets down to serious business -- words. How to find them, how to use them and make them clear and concise. The third chapter is all about feelings and how to use them. In the fourth he goes into the necessity for conflict, what to do and not to do in building it. Chapter Five presents the strategies of fiction. "Fiction..." he writes, "creates an especially vivid vicarious tension...Your job as a writer is to control and manipulate this tension." He also delineates the source of story satisfaction and describes how to produce it.Chapter 6 is all about getting a story started, lining up story elements, developing the middle of the story and winding it up. Story people and the importance of characters and character development are covered in Chapter 7. Planning the story, recognizing good story material, preparing to write, and what you need in order to succeed as a writer wind up the last few chapters. He devotes one page to marketing advice and that simply directs the reader to study the markets.This is, without a doubt, one of the most useful and easiest to use books on the craft of writing that has ever been published. Its advice is timeless. This book should be in every writer's collection.

The best book on writing around

This book was recommended to me before I sold my first book, and I'm certain what I learned in reading it contributed to that first sale and all the ones that followed (I've sold 45 novels in all). I highly recommend it, not only for novices, but for all writers.

Skip the MFA classes and read this book, then write!

I had published a fair amount of fiction BEFORE I read it. But reading Swain, having him help me take apart the structure of my scenes, the very order of the sentences in a paragraph, the order of words in a sentence, and to then change them for maximum power--wow! Since then I've published much more fiction, because I have an understanding of the techniques of writing. The selling parts of the book are things I've gotten elsewhere, but learning what makes good sentences, good scenes, balanced chapters--it's worth a fortune. This book and Gary Provost's MAKING YOUR WORDS WORK are the two best tools for writers I've found. And I'm saying this as my 1th book is about to come out, and my 500th shorter piece. Thanks, Dwight. Wish you were still around.

Definitely the bible

When it comes to the art of writing, put Dwight Swain in the coveted class of Strunk and White. What that respected duo does for writing style, Swain does for writing technique. With nary a wasted word, he rips away all the mystery, all the obfuscation from everything from character to conflict to complication, plus a lot more. No question about it: His "Techniques of the Selling Writer" IS--and should be--the writer's bible. Jules Sanders