How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein
Published in 1999, Sol Stein’s follow-up to Stein on Writing gives indispensable advice to fledgling novelists and non-fiction writers moving to fiction. How to Grow a Novel covers conflict, characters, dialogue, point of view, hooking the reader, detail, rookie mistakes, revision, and what happens at the editor’s desk. In a slim and fascinating section at the end, Stein describes the publishing process, the power the sales team has over editorial, and how a book succeeds or otherwise before it even leaves the house.
Throughout How to Grow a Novel Stein focuses on the reader’s experience and how to engineer the reader’s emotional responses.
“What the sports spectator and the reader enjoy the most is a contest of two strong teams, a game whose outcome hangs in the balance as long as possible.” (9)
He champions adversarial dialogue, precise diction, and the rigorous audit of scene outlines.
“A scene outline provides the same opportunity for examining what’s most wrong in the story and fixing it before spending months of wasteful writing on chapters that were conceived badly and needed to be excised or changed . The scene-by-scene examination of a proposed novel is a major step in the right direction.” (17)
The book includes Q&As for a writer to consider of their open manuscript, and key-point summaries.
However, this writing guide has a poverty of examples from world literature. Instead, Stein largely illustrates from his own writing or that of Elia Kazan - whom he cites to death. The frequent use of anonymous examples lacks credibility, and sentences like “One of my students … sold a short novel for a third of a million dollars” (31) read as advertisement. Content is repeated and the personal anecdotes are woolly.
That said, I jotted down pages of sterling advice - particularly on dialogue and scene outlines - and Stein has whet my appetite for Matador by Barnaby Conrad (1952).
The Craft of Writing:
Richard Cohen’s How to Write Like Tolstoy was my top read of 2020. It crackles with insight.