The Writer's Digest Guide to Good Writing

Essays, selected from the first seventy-five years of Writer's Digest magazine, cover style, genre, dialogue, plot, research, organization, and endings

On the occasion of the 75th birthday of Writer's Digest, its editors have collected 49 columns from the magazine that best exemplify "fine writing about the art and craft of writing." Included are essays from writers famed (Isaac Asimov, Allen Ginsberg, Stephen King) and forgotten (Morry Hull, Allis McKay) on such subjects as setting the pace of a story, writing science fiction ("think like an alien, write like an angel"), and getting inside your characters. Irving Wallace ponders "that most important of all gifts--an eye for the unusual" (December 1938), while David X. Manners divulges his "Ten Deadly Sins" of story writing (August 1946) and Carl E. Johnson explores ways of bringing "sharpness of sensory detail to our writing efforts" (May 1972). From Gary Provost we have "Seven Beacons of Excellent Writing"--brevity, clarity, precision, harmony, humanity, honesty, and poetry (March 1984); from Linton Weeks, "Eight Ingredients of Powerful Nonfiction" (September 1989). Toward book's end, appropriately, Don McKinney addresses the question of what makes a good ending (February 1992). --Jane Steinberg