Book Description
MOTHER MILLER'S HOW TO WRITE GOOD BOOK is a writing guide that doesn't take itself too seriously, but even so, it is full of advice that the would-be writer of prose, and particularly of fiction, would do well to heed. Put this concise guide on a shelf close to your desk, in between THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE and your favorite dictionary. You'll reach for it often. Written with wit and humor, MMHTWGB (this book is best known by its initials) covers everything from plotting to character development to grammar to manuscript style. Sasha Miller writes with the sharp, witty, acerbic, and yet gentle style that has made her the bane and the delight of hundreds of writing students.

From the Back Cover
"Without a well-oiled story-telling instinct, the person who is schooled only in the technical aspects of language will put out finely constructed drivel that will bore a reader to tears. Story-telling instinct can't be taught; either you have it or you don't. But technical skills can be taught, and without them, the would-be writer is operating with both hands firmly tied behind her back. There may be a story lying somewhere beneath the clumsy verbiage, the poor phrasing, the incoherent sentence structures, but it is suffocating for lack of readers who will attempt to fight their way through the garbage to get to it. And editors--those people who buy works of fiction--won't bother." --From Essay One, NUTS AND BOLTS

About the Author
SASHA MILLER says she is "so busy teaching that I don't have time for my own writing. Maybe there's a message in that somewhere." She is "terminally" married to Himself, a man even more eccentric than she is, and they are the parents of two extremely eccentric cats, Pandora Josephine Prettypuss Calicat Miller and Natasha Tatiana Irene Benova Jennifer Graycat Miller (Ta-DAH). She is the author of six previous books, the most recent of which is LADYLORD, published in 1996. It is a fantasy set in a world reminiscent of medieval Japan. She is at present collaborating with Andre Norton on a fantasy trilogy for Tor Books. TO THE KING, A DAUGHTER, will be published in September, 2000, KNIGHT OR KNAVE in 2001, and A CROWN DISOWNED in 2002.

Excerpted from Mother Miller's How to Write Good Book by Sasha Miller. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Essay One: Nuts and Bolts The emphasis in this work is on the technical aspects of writing--the nuts and bolts. This is the punctuation, the grammar, the microwriting. Microwriting is the way words are put together to convey what the writer has in mind instead of their going astray and winding up as something altogether different and sometimes--too often, actually--unintentionally hilarious. If a good (i.e. competent in the technical sense) ms.'s purpose is to provide adequate traffic signs to guide the reader toward a close semblance of the story the writer has conceived in her mind, the sloppy techniques one runs into too often these days--shrugging or sitting or grinning dialogue, wildly incorrect punctuation, shabby grammar where sentences (yea, entire paragraphs) make no logical sense and sometimes say the opposite of what the author (presumably) intended and otherwise clutter up the landscape with billboards and political posters from two campaigns ago. The reader either has to fight her way through the unnecessary verbal underbrush or close the book quietly and go away, never to return. This is something every writer has to learn, that he is not in charge. The reader has the ultimate power. All I can teach is technical competence--to help the writer transmit the story that's in her head onto the paper in a clear enough form that the reader has a shot at re-creating a close approximation of it in HIS head as well. If there's no story to begin with, that pretty much writes paid to the whole effort. Of course, the finest technical proficiency will not make up for a thing if the would-be writer lacks the story-telling instinct. Without a well-oiled story-telling instinct, the person who is schooled only in the technical aspects of language will put out finely constructed drivel that will bore a reader to tears. Story-telling instinct can't be taught; either you have it or you don't. But technical skills can be taught, and without them, the would-be writer is operating with both hands firmly tied behind her back. There may be a story lying somewhere beneath the clumsy verbiage, the poor phrasing, the incoherent sentence structures, but it is suffocating for lack of readers who will attempt to fight their way through the garbage to get to it. And editors--those people who buy works of fiction--won't bother. It trots in tandem. Those who work with words must hone and refine their skills constantly so they can to transfer that wonderful story that has taken shape in their heads onto the page clearly enough that it has a hope of being re-created in the head of the reader and have it survive this process as intact as possible. To accomplish this miracle, these language skills must be integrated into a writer's very bones so they become tools of her trade, and not self-conscious techniques. All it takes to see this too clearly in action is to have a quick read through a few amateur mss. to see why some amateurs are likely to remain so. One of the quickest way to get a ms. rejected, and never mind the story the ms. is trying to relay, is poor handling of our mother tongue. Adverbial clauses, dangling participles, and other atrocities abound and scream "Amateur Hour"! One of the big things an acquiring editor looks at is how much work she will have to put into a ms. to make it publishable. Think about it. You turn in a messy ms., you are, in effect, shooting yourself in the foot before you ever get off the ground, if you don't mind a mangled metaphor. If your ms. is REALLY a grammatical horror show, you won't even get far enough with an editor for him to find out if the story is decent. To be fair, grammatical law-breaking is not usually a calculated assault on the rules of the language. Rather, they are mistakes of ignorance. Whether we like it or not, whether we think it is "fair" or not, grammar and punctuation do have rules, and they are rules we must learn, each and every one of us, and furthermore, they are rules that must be followed. Yes, there is a little latitude, but precious little. You don't want to hurl your reader out of the dream by some mistake that is easily corrected if only you had known how to do it. That's what grammar, punctuation, etc. is all about. If a would-be writer thinks learning all this is just too boring for words and doesn't want to bother with it, then Mother Miller strongly suggests he ought to sit down and seriously re-think his ambitions along these lines.