I walked into the Landmark store to kill some time and picked up two books that caught my eye. One of it was 'Now that you're rich, lets fall in love'. Little did I know that it would end up getting the lowest rating I ever gave to a book by far. This is not a review, it's some serious feedback to the young authors. While I am impressed with the fact that both these guys ended up publishing their second book at such a young age, I am disappointed at their lack of understanding of the craft of writing. I am no expert myself and I have never written a book, but I still have some serious feedback.
1) Writing for a particular target audience does not just mean using their lingo. If this were true, children's books would be full of blabber. Writing using contemporary themes is extremely tough and only very few people can pull it off well. Those people do not hang on to the dialect of the young.
2) Think well about the story you want to tell and stick to one theme. Swinging between stark reality, fantasy, recreation of some sensational news item, element of shock and suspense...this is exactly why movies flop too (especially ones where the son's of big starts are introduced).
3) If the story is light on its feet, keep the number of characters small. Think if you have to make a movie of the book, one or two characters should run the main story with every one else supplementing it. Your book had 6 characters whose lives overlapped with everyone else in the most confusing way. The characters ended up trampling the story and pushing it under the carpet!
4) Repetition is the most common pit everyone who writes(in any form) falls into. It is tough to correct because most of the times this is a blind spot and we tend to fall in love with what we write. Learning to eliminate repetition is important to keep the write-up readable. Count the number of times you used "whatever" and dozen other words that fill up your pages again and again.
5) Proofread!! I mean, proofread!!! When you publish a book, you CANNOT have ANY mistakes, grammatical or typos. I can, with great difficulty, forgive one or two but your book has one or two mistakes per page!!
I will surely read your next work and if you consider this 'your style', you just attracted some negative publicity from me for your future book.
No stars at all out of 5. Sorry! For the story line, read this site.
Label: My Books My Reviews