How Not to Write a Novel

Upfront, I'll admit that the hilariously overwrought examples of bad writing are amusing, especially the way each error's section contains previous types of error. It gets increasingly more fun to find all these "gems" in each excerpt as you go along.

I've never read any other writing guides, so I really don't have much to compare this to. Regardless, it didn't strike me as all that great. This may be a bit nit-picky, but the authors seem unsure exactly how much they want to commit to the premise. In some passages they'll play along and suggest ways to avoid getting published, cheekily assuming that to be your goal. In others, they seem to lapse into writing a more typical guide, with advice on how you can and should get published. If there is any pattern to this back and forth, I couldn't see it; perhaps it comes down to which author wrote which section.

Also, for each given mistake, it's easy to think of examples from books that are not only published but popular. It actually becomes difficult not to. For each entry I found myself thinking, "oh, Jim Butcher does that" or "you mean, like Herman Melville?" Assuming the authors are correct in their edicts, I can only draw two possible conclusions. Either these are indeed mistakes, but good authors manage to pull them off; or, publishers and the target audience don't care about mistakes nearly as much as this book seems to imply.

Alternatively, one could view most of these mistakes as simply tropes, neither inherently good nor bad. Tropes can be used skillfully or not, and whether they're appropriate depends on a number of things. It often comes down to how overused a particular one has been in recent fiction. It seems to me that one's time might be better spent perusing the tvtropes website, at least until (and if) they someday publish a book of their own.