Crafting Novels & Short Stories

Crafting Novels & Short Stories is the broadest of Writer’s Digest’s compilation volumes, an anthology that gathers material from many authors and craft books to cover, in a single fat volume, the whole of fiction writing: character, plot, structure, viewpoint, dialogue, revision, and more. It’s the all-in-one option among the compilations, and reviewing it means weighing the appeal of completeness against the inevitable shallowness that comes with trying to cover everything at once.

For a beginning writer who wants one book that touches every major element of craft, the breadth is attractive, a single purchase that surveys the entire field.

The everything-in-one-place appeal

The book’s strength is exactly its scope. It gathers strong material on the full range of fiction fundamentals from many experienced contributors, so a new writer gets exposure to character building, plotting, structure, point of view, scene construction, dialogue, and revision all between two covers, each from a writer with real expertise in that area.

As an orientation to the whole of craft, a map of what a fiction writer needs to learn, it does a real service, and the contributor model means each topic comes from someone who knows it instead of from one generalist stretching across all of it.

The cost of covering everything

The unavoidable trade-off is depth. A single volume covering all of fiction craft can give each element only a survey, so a writer serious about any one area, dialogue, structure, character, will quickly outgrow the relevant chapters and need a dedicated book. The compilation format worsens this: assembled from separate sources, it has the same unevenness and lack of progressive coherence as its sibling volumes, a collection of good pieces instead of a unified course.

It’s a sampler, excellent for discovering what you need to study next, limited as a place to study it deeply.

The novel-and-short-story question

One more note: the title promises both novels and short stories, but the two forms have different demands, the short story’s compression and single effect versus the novel’s sustained architecture, and a single survey volume can only gesture at the distinction instead of treat each form’s specific craft in depth. A writer focused on the short story will find the coverage thin on what makes that form unique, and is better served by a book devoted to it.

Is Crafting Novels & Short Stories worth reading?

It’s a useful, broad orientation to fiction craft, valuable for a beginner who wants one book mapping the whole territory from expert contributors. It loses ground for the inevitable shallowness of covering everything, the anthology format’s unevenness, and a title that promises more form-specific depth than a survey can deliver. Buy it as a first overview and a guide to what to study next; don’t expect it to teach any single element deeply. A solid sampler of the craft, best as a starting point instead of a destination.

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