Practical advice to fledgling novelists and non-fiction writers moving to fiction.

How to Grow a Novel covers conflict, characters, dialogue, point of view, hooking the reader, details, rookie mistakes, revision, and what happens at the editor’s desk. In a slim and fascinating section at the end, Stein describes the publishing process, the power the sales team has over editorial decisions, and how a book succeeds or otherwise before it even leaves the house.

Throughout the book Stein focuses on the reading experience and how an author can engineer the reader’s emotional responses.

“What the sports spectator and the reader enjoy the most is a contest of two strong teams, a game whose outcome hangs in the balance as long as possible.” (9)

He champions adversarial dialogue, precise diction, and the rigorous audit of scene outlines.

“A scene outline provides the same opportunity for examining what’s most wrong in the story and fixing it before spending months of wasteful writing on chapters that were conceived badly and needed to be excised or changed. The scene-by-scene examination of a proposed novel is a major step in the right direction.” (17)

How to Grow a Novel includes Q&As for a writer to consider of their open manuscript, and key-point summaries.

Stein largely illustrates from his own writing or that of Elia Kazan - whom he cites to death. I thought the frequent use of anonymous examples undermined the credibility of the point, and sentences like: “One of my students … sold a short novel for a third of a million dollars,” (31) just sounds like personal advertising. I wanted to see examples from a range of big names.

That said, I jotted down pages of notes - particularly on dialogue and scene outlines. Good, useful guidance.

How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein

Writing Wild by Kathryn Aalto

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman