Good Advice on Writing

There are plenty of good quotes with good advice in here, but the book is organized alphabetically under "F" for example is "fame" "focus" and "flowery style"; hard to make good practical use of that, unless you're looking for randomish inspiration.

Excellent, one of the best books on writing I've owned. Great quotes and ideas to help with your writing now.

This book is written by Americans, for Americans, and contains therefore a superabundance of self-satisfied quotes culled from the writings of American writers, especially the kind who Use Three Names. It could more usefully be titled 'Good Advice For the Kind of American Who Hopes to Be Known as a Writer (American)'.'Good Advice' commences with a 'lede', written in a style so glib it made my eyes sting. Other books can manage only an Introduction, or a Preface, or a Foreword, and like that. Not this one. What was it that Strunk, (as amended and enhanced by White) said about fashionable words, like 'taut' and 'luminous'? Only in America, by the way, could there be a Professor Strunk who was not a comic character imagined by Ring Lardner.Those writers cited, and who are not American, are merely those known to Americans, and therefore admissible to the canon. There is very small representation from authors of the British Commonwealth, people who are known to use only Two Names, poor creatures.Altogether too many quotes begin with pomposities like 'Nothing is sillier than...' What, nothing in creation is sillier? Lawks-a-mussy, such omniscience. Altogether too many quotes are sententious, and a leavening of flippancies, mixed in by the brothers Safir(e) with heavy hands, does nothing to correct this.Of course, there are some good things here and there, as the Brothers Surefire would be the first to admit. For example, a fine thought from Michel de Montaigne, whose series of essays in pitiless self-examination, written for the Atlantic Monthly, led to so many doctoral dissertations by novelists training at Middle West Institutes of Advanced Writing. Some fine counsel from Sam de Johnson, whose stewardship of 'The Talk of the Town' under the exacting editorship of the irascible Harold 'God How I Pity Me' Ross did so much to set the style of a million parodies. And Wolfgang Amadeus Goethe gets, as we say down our way, a guernsey. Goethe, it will be recalled, wrote those dialect pieces for the old SatEvePost. Who can ever forget 'Schmallisch Chickens Am Schweetisch?' Certainly not myself. There's some high-brow stuff from Erica de Jong, Sidney de Sheldon, and Judith de Krantz. Jackie de Collins admits she is 'raunchy' and that she doesn't write for maiden aunts. Heady stuff.Missing is my own favourite zinger from Evelyn Waugh: '... very few of the great writers of trash aimed low to start with ... Most of them wrote sonnet sequences in youth ... Practically no one ever sets out to write trash. Those that do don't get very far.' Sound words. One must bring something to the table. Those who only ever read trash, and then attempt to write trash, don't even manage to write tosh.The vain, the credulous, and the Great Unread may find this collection inspiring. For my part, it smells less of the lamp, and more of the Readers' Digest 'Life's Like That'.