How to Write the Perfect Novel - A Tongue-In-Cheek Guide to Certain Literary Success

by Chancery Stone

There are hundreds of conventional writers' guides on the market, but none so scathing, cynical and downright cantankerous as this one. Forget toadying to publishers or obsessing over return postage, in this insider exposé veteran author, Chancery Stone, spares no-one's blushes as she strips the book world bare and reveals the true natures of publishers and authors alike. 

Interspersed with laugh-out-loud parodies of best-selling thrillers, romances, crime, science fiction, erotica and even the Booker Prize, and naming names and showing no mercy to the perpetrators,  How to Write the Perfect Novel  will submerge you in such brain-numbing brilliance that you may never browse through a book shop in quite the same way again.... 

""The perfect antidote to the thousands of well-meaning, hefty writers' guides that currently flood the market"" 
Essential Writers 

"A bitter look at how to succeed" 
Writers' Forum (Reader Review) "This is the kind of book that you read for the humour the scathing remarks and the blatant flaunting of all the rules. Yet it is so cleverly written that you find yourself learning things that quite frankly none of the other how to books teach you" 
W H Smith UK   (Reader Review)
"Chicken soup for the jaded writer's soul" 
Good Reads  

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2008

About the author

Chancery Stone likes wading about in darkness. She always has.

Equally well, she loves the magical powers of redemption, particularly self-redemption. She has a particular fondness for heroes (of either sex) who don’t let anyone fuck with them. This does not involve kick-boxing, vampirism, government agencies or a sociopathic knowledge of firearms. Instead this involves going their own way, in their own time, to their own tune and realising that if God is watching it’s only to see if you’re one of the smart ones.

Chancery Stone was born half a lifetime ago in a quaint Scottish fishing hamlet known as East Kilbride, where she would run wild and untrammelled about the hills, picking heather and singing in the Gaelic. In her spare time, between making moss dyes and raising nursling quails, she ran a child sex club. She was a child herself at this time, of course, and therefore has managed to evade the long arm of the law.

At least thus far.

The Dirty Club had a simple remit: sex, sex and more sex. Limited as it was by her age and ignorance, this chiefly involved urolagnia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, humiliation, bondage, homosexuality, frottage, fingering, nudism, paedophilia, ritualistic power games, domination, bullying, more humiliation and more urolagnia. In fact, altogether too much urolagnia.

She was outed several times – by children to other children, and by adults who really didn’t like that sort of thing. Driven underground at the age of twelve she became a sad academic recluse and took up reading savage and horrific literature and absolutely anything with sex in it.

Then there was wider reading. And yet more reading. And sick three-novels-a-day-habit style reading. And a lot of theatre. And then back to sex again – sex and more sex – extended by now to contain the more missionary and conventional forms thereof.

Eventually she got sick of reading (but, somehow, never of sex) and decided to write instead, and then all of this life-strangely-lived started to spiral out of her, backwards, onto paper.

We expect that once the DANNY Quadrilogy™ is finally done she will turn out some very interesting books in the vein of “Moss Dyeing for Beginners“ and “Quail Baby, Fly Away Home.”

And after that there will be death.

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining and educating journey into the world of writings slings and arrows, contradictions and endless frustrations.
Chancery covers the gamut of writing pitfalls and cliches while parting some hard earned wisdom. Thank of it as Chicken Soup for the Slightly Jaded Writer.

[Poison Pixie Publishing]

There are hundreds of conventional writers’ guides on the market, but none so scathing, cynical and downright cantankerous as this one. Forget toadying to publishers or obsessing over return postage, in this insider exposé veteran author, Chancery Stone, spares no-one’s blushes as she strips the book world bare and reveals the true working methods of publishers and authors alike.

Interspersed with laugh-out-loud parodies of best-selling thrillers, romances, crime, science fiction, erotica and even the Booker Prize, and naming names and showing no mercy to the perpetrators, How to Write the Perfect Novel will submerge you in such brain-numbing brilliance that you may never browse through a book shop in quite the same way again....

""The perfect antidote to the thousands of well-meaning, hefty writers’ guides that currently flood the market""
Essential Writers

"A bitter look at how to succeed"
Writers’ Forum

“Chicken soup for the jaded writer’s soul”
Good Reads [Reader Review:]

"This is the kind of book that you read for the humour the scathing remarks and the blatant flaunting of all the rules. Yet it is so cleverly written that you find yourself learning things that quite frankly none of the other how to books teach you"
W H Smith UK [Reader Review:]

[A.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read very few 'conventional' writers' guides. Most of them are as dull as counting grains of sand with a toothpick (the worst offender being, of course, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories). No one wants to sit through an author’s self-righteous preaching about the ‘right’ way to write. So it was with great pleasure and anticipation that I settled down to read this tongue-in-cheek, scathing, cynical, and downright amusing how-to guide.

The guide is penned by Chancery Stone, a lady of negligible repute, and offers a number of humorous how-to lists with accompanying parodies as examples. Stone offers scathing advice on how to write novels of all shapes and sizes: romance, mystery, porn, literary... the list goes on. And she’s not afraid of naming names or parodying popular authors such as Kate Mosse, Nora Roberts, the entire Mills & Boon catalogue, Agatha Christie, and more.

Is Stone merely another author embittered by her experiences in the publishing industry? Perhaps. But surely that makes her even better qualified to make fun of it.

Yes, it’s not as informative or educational as other tongue-in-cheek guides. (If you're looking to actually learn about writing and craft, I'd recommend instead How Not to Write a Novel: A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide), but, amidst the humour and sarcasm, are Stone’s hard-earned nuggets of wisdom on the pitfalls and clichés to avoid.

Overall, this cleverly written guide is a funny, quick read for authors and readers of trashy novels alike. I very much enjoyed it.

[Amy Woods-smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book from a goodreads drawing. While I am a reader, not a writer, I still got a great deal of entertainment from this book. I really enjoyed the author's sense of humor!