How to Write a Be$t $eller

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

In chatty, conversational tones suitable for budding authors and school libraries, Rohmer tries to fulfill the book’s title by a show-and-tell technique. How does a famous writer prepare his bestsellers? His topics cover: the concept, the preparation (research, plot, character), the style, re-writes, editors, agents, contracts, publishers, promotion, and marketing tours. Strewn about are extremely useful quotations and advice from other writers, useful simply because of the different points of view being expressed. All in all, it is a nice book, albeit a very short one (few pages, lots of big type and white space). I suppose that I could quibble with the reason he gives for doing research (he says that the reason for research is to weave facts together; I say it is to have colour, detail, and focus to show events as they happened); but I won’t.