If you follow Ray Rhamey’s blog Flogging the Quill, then you know the premise: Send in the first page of your novel, and Rhamey will read, analyze, and tell you if he found it compelling enough to make him turn to the second page (and why or why not). The key word here is “compelling”. Editors and agents are busy people, and it’s your first page that determines whether they read any further. The idea is to hook them right from the get-go, and that’s what the FTQ blog is all about. The experience of having my first page “flogged”, and watching others get whipped as well, was a real eye-opener for me, and FTQ continues to be one of my must-read blogs.
Now Rhamey has a new book coming out: Flogging the Quill: Crafting a Novel that Sells. With the goal of bringing a novel manuscript up to publishable quality, Flogging the Quill is a Swiss army knife fixit tool for a myriad of beginner-novelist problems, as well as a valuable resource for experienced writers and editors.
This book is filled to the brim with advice and coaching from an author with years of experience in advertising, screenwriting, novel writing and editing. From the press release:
The first section, covering the craft of storytelling, includes lessons on creating tension, creating the character “care factor,” what drives a plot, the six vital story ingredients, and tools for spotting shortcomings in a narrative.
In Description, writers learn how experiential description can characterize, plus how to handle the tricky character-description hurdle, staging, and overwriting.
The Dialogue section helps writers avoid leaden overuse of dialogue tags, enliven a dialogue scene with action beats, and deliver the sound of dialogue.
The vital “when to tell, how to show” lesson in the Technique section has been praised by literary agents and college teachers. The section also coaches on point of view, including the problems “head-hopping” can cause with readers.
With the Words section, Rhamey reveals unique insights to the good and bad of using adverbs in a fiction narrative, and guides writers in weeding out weak, wasted, and wrong words.
Computer tips that make writing more productive are included, plus a “workout” section where writers apply lessons learned to real efforts by beginning novelists.
New York Times bestseller Tess Gerritsen says, “…it’s a must-have for any novelist.” Literary agent Dan Conaway of Writers House says, “…Ray Rhamey’s book provides the sort of practical, sensible advice that really can help you become a better writer.”
