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WHAT MAKES A STORY interesting? Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Nuts and Bolts of Drama
Stage-setting
Openings
Leave-em Hanging
Dialogue
Mood and Atmosphere
Character Development
Point of View
Subtlety and Misdirection
Time and Place
Pacing
Endings
If you look at the list, you'll see many of the "usual suspects" of writing subjects - things that you may well have studied before.
What this book tries to do is to show how each of these areas relates to the subject matter - conflict, action, and suspense. So, for example, building these through dialogue, or point of view, is covered.
This worked well for the first few chapters - even with topics with which I'm very familiar, I felt I was learning new ways of looking at the tools available, and using them in the service of better conflict.
But I'm afraid it got very flabby towards the end, as if the author was running out of things to say, or had left the things he's less comfortable with until last. All in all, the points he has to make could be distilled down into a far more compact form, which would be quicker to read and easier to refer to.
Also, I'm afraid the samples he offers to illustrate his lessons are dreadful (except where he's culled them from other, more accomplished writers). That shouldn't make a difference, perhaps, because they're only examples after all, but in a series that includes people like Orson Scott Card, who's a superb writer as well as teacher, I expected better.
Overall, while I've certainly gleaned some useful insights from this book, I came away disappointed. I was far more impressed by other titles in the series: Character and Viewpoint, and Beginnings, Middles, and Ends, come to mind.
He touches on suspense's relationship with all sorts of basic writing issues such as dialogue, openings, cliffhangers, mood and atmosphere, character development, point of view, pacing, endings, and so on. Noble does a good job of focusing on specific techniques relevant to suspense for the most part.
It isn't a perfect book. It isn't as dry as most textbooks, but it could certainly be better than it is. Some of the examples that Mr. Noble makes up to use in the book are a bit on the overblown side, which kind of undercuts some of his points. He might have been better off using more examples from published fiction. Also, some of Mr. Noble's assertions regarding his topics have since been proven to be wrong. For example, when talking about the logic of settings: "...And a horror-suspense story would have problems if it was set in the unfolding of a miracle." I've seen this done quite well, actually.
This book was originally copyrighted in 1994, and this may be part of the problem. Since then some of the techniques that he lauds as strong and effective have become over-used and trite. (Overused techniques became that way precisely because they're so effective.) Some of the things he says can't be done have been done. As it is, this book serves as a very good example of why you need to do a lot of reading in the fiction field you want to write in. Otherwise, how will you know which of his techniques have been over-used, which can be seen as trite if you aren't careful how you use them, and which are still seen as solid, useful methods?
Most of Noble's examples are action-oriented melodrama; his techniques lend themselves naturally to the same. On the bright side, it doesn't have to be action-oriented; Noble endorses soap operas at one point, meaning that you can also use emotions as what you're constantly escalating. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against having your writing be exciting; but it should be exciting because there are dynamic characters at opposition, not because you're using tricks like Noble's to artificially generate it.
You can write a pretty good, forgettable airport novel if you follow Noble's advice; if you also buy Jack Bickham's Scene & Structure, you can even think about elevating your potboiler up to the level where you can make some cash off of it. But don't get it into your head that this is the right, or only, way to write...because it's not.
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