Falling In Love With Romance: August 2012

Will Write for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel

By Cathy Yardley

St Martin’s Press

Allow me to preface my review with my criteria regarding writing books that lay claim to a particular focus. If a book claims to tell you how to write dialog, for instance, and three chapters are about dialog and then it devolves into advice about writing in general, I’m not going to be impressed, no matter how good the in-general advice is. Like fiction, the book makes a specific promise in the title and the beginning pages. Whatever else the book does, I expect it to payoff that specific promise. In a book like Will Write for Shoes, I expect the lion’s portion of the book to be genre specific. Now that the disclaimer's done, let's see what this book offers.

Will Write for Shoes is divided into 3 sections.

I. It’s a Chick’s World

II. Where Do I Sign Up? How to Write a Chick Lit Novel

III. Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes . . . The Crapshoot That is Selling Your Novel

IV. Frequently Asked Questions

+ Appendixes (Mostly) Useful Information

The first section discusses what chick lit is and defines a dozen or so subgenres, some of which I’ve heard of (or even read) like Mommy Lit, Lad Lit, and Hen Lit. Then there were subgenres I’d hadn’t even imagined existed like Tart Noir, Widow Lit, and Bride Lit. I found this useful and even interesting, and if I were thinking about writing some form of chick lit, this would help me narrow both my writing and my reading focus.

Section II gets a little schizo. It talks about advanced concepts like voice and story structure but gears it toward a novice writer. For instance:

If you’ve read any other how-to writing books, or heard authors speak or joined any writing organizations, you will at some point hear about “having a distinctive voice.”

Voice is an advanced concept yet in the phrase “if you’ve read…,” the author assumes that the reader of this little tome may not have so much as cracked another writing book.

The author does try to make this section relate to chick lit and she does a pretty good job of that, but I still found a good 80% to be “general” writing advice. None of it was bad advice, but it doesn’t meet the criteria I outlined above and the advice is superficial, which it has to be given the page limitation.

The complete list of topics that are addressed in the second section are:
Premise

Characters

Plot

Outlining

Free-form writing

Structure

Point of view

Setting

Voice

Revisions

That’s quite a list for a mere 56 pages. Most of these topics have entire books written about them. Of course, if one assumed the reader already had the general knowledge and was only reading this for the specific knowledge of how these things applied specifically to chick lit, it might not take more than 56 pages.

Alas, that’s not the case.

Nor is it the case with the third section of how to get published. Everything in this section can be found online and it will be more extensive and much more current. Publishing is changing rapidly, so this section of any print book can’t help but be dated, probably before it hits Amazon’s bookshelf.

The appendixes include sections Sample Query letters, sample scene outlines and synopsis, agent and publisher listings. I don’t find the samples particularly useful since, again, you can find lots of examples online. The book was published in 2005 so the listings are of course dated.

In short, this gets a thumbs down recommendation from me. I have yet to find a really good book on writing chicklit. Does anyone have any recommendations?