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A review by slcrow
Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go by Les Edgerton
4.0
I'm somewhere between 3 and 4 stars for this rating, but I bumped it up to 4 because I do feel that it's earned more than an "average" rating.
As with any instructional book about writing, there's always information that the writer comes to the table knowing previously. I haven't read any instructional book on the writing process and been totally blown away by entirely new information. But a good writing book will show you something new and give you a new perspective on your work that you haven't considered before, and I think that this book is successful at that.
On the other side of the coin, I think he could have achieved this goal much more quickly. Edgerton relies on a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of examples, to the point that sometimes I think they bog down his points. I don't have a problem with his repetition (he repeats a number of significant points a few times throughout the book), since repetition equals retention in most cases, but there were simply too many examples for my taste. I usually only need one or two really solid examples, and he gave me six or seven or more. I also felt that some of his examples weren't the strongest--some of the openings he touted as "good" or "great" seemed to me to be rather cliche and so-so.
I think that this book will be a good starting point for a beginning writer struggling to get her novel off the ground--someone who's been agonizing over the best way to start things off and really not sure about what will catch an editor's eye. For what it is, I think this is a very good jumping-off point, even if it was a little more introductory and sometimes a little more ham-fisted than was useful for me.
As with any instructional book about writing, there's always information that the writer comes to the table knowing previously. I haven't read any instructional book on the writing process and been totally blown away by entirely new information. But a good writing book will show you something new and give you a new perspective on your work that you haven't considered before, and I think that this book is successful at that.
On the other side of the coin, I think he could have achieved this goal much more quickly. Edgerton relies on a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of examples, to the point that sometimes I think they bog down his points. I don't have a problem with his repetition (he repeats a number of significant points a few times throughout the book), since repetition equals retention in most cases, but there were simply too many examples for my taste. I usually only need one or two really solid examples, and he gave me six or seven or more. I also felt that some of his examples weren't the strongest--some of the openings he touted as "good" or "great" seemed to me to be rather cliche and so-so.
I think that this book will be a good starting point for a beginning writer struggling to get her novel off the ground--someone who's been agonizing over the best way to start things off and really not sure about what will catch an editor's eye. For what it is, I think this is a very good jumping-off point, even if it was a little more introductory and sometimes a little more ham-fisted than was useful for me.