The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creative Writing
You don't have to be a complete idiot to glean something fromThe  Complete Idiot's Guide to Creative Writing, but it would help to be a complete  novice. In a mere 300 or so large-print pages, author Laurie Rozakis sails through the  fundamentals of writing novels, short stories, poetry, biographies, textbooks, reference  books, magazine articles, plays, and screenplays. Then she offers primers on getting  published, finding and dealing with an agent, and the legal issues involved. Whew! There  is a lot of useful information here, but any given section tends toward the basic. The tone  is perky and enthusiastic, slaphappy funny, and trying a little too hard to be hip--has  poetry's place in the worldreally"changed more radically than Dennis  Rodman's hair color"? Interesting tidbits gleaned: Margaret Mitchell originally  planned to call Scarlett, the protagonist inGone with the Wind, Pansy;  John McPhee "accumulated fifteen years ofNew Yorkerrejections before  the magazine began buying his articles." Best quirky advice: if you're a romance  novelist looking for a pseudonym, try combining the name of your first pet and your  mother's maiden name; if you're a soap opera scriptwriter with the same quandary,  combine your middle name with the street you lived on as a child.