Review: Wendig is your indispensible writing wingman. Yes, in the 'Top Gun' sense.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 21, 2011
The title of this book is a lie. The book contains 20 chapters, yes. Each chapter is comprised of a list of 25 discrete pieces of writing advice, certainly. But bollocks to that! There are way more than 500 useful tidbits for the working (or aspiring) writer in Chuck Wendig's latest collection from his terribleminds.com blog.Belligerent at times, humble at others and usually laugh-out-loud filthy, the advice in this book is suitable for anyone so insanely in love with the written word that they feel moved to string 60,000 or more of them together in a narrative. Wendig will help you make that narrative cohere. He will drive out the demons of self-doubt. He will cast down the black-eyed angels of blatant exposition and poorly-expressed theme. He will conjure the flames by which you will purify your mushy verbiage into a glittering prose blade. Brothers and sisters, he will transform your novel from a 98K weakling into a heroic three-book deal with film rights.Okay, maybe not. The usual warnings apply: he will occasionally conjure an image so physiologically, sexually or scatalogically improbable that you will turn mauve with horror. But if you can stomach a sharply-observed autoerotic asphyxiation metaphor, then you can probably stomach the news that you may not be quite ready to hit send on that submission to the Kindle store just yet, in which case `500 Ways' will have done its work well.