The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creative Writing, 2nd Edition

You don't have to be a complete idiot to glean something from The 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 world really "changed more radically than Dennis Rodman's hair color"? Interesting tidbits gleaned: Margaret Mitchell originally planned to call Scarlett, the protagonist in Gone with the Wind, Pansy; John McPhee "accumulated fifteen years of New Yorker rejections 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.