Stephen Koch

I'm an absolute beginner who had this book recommended.

It seems to be full of wisdom that makes sense in retrospect or maybe summarizes intuitions that an intermediate-writer might have been struggling to make, and I think an intermediate writer might get a lot more out of this than I did.

As an actual total beginner, though, it's a little all over the place. I was able to get a few really nice solid stand-alone tips out of it, but I feel like it was lots of tips for problems I haven't encountered yet as opposed to 'how to begin'.

Still, it is deeply encouraging (except for a random chapter close to the beginning which is deliberately discouraging for 'realism') and full of the writer's personal musing so you kind of get the idea of what he's feeling and has felt while engaging in writing and generally seems positive.… (more)

By far the best book on writing a story/novel I've read.

It not a beginner's book, though. You need some mileage behind you to extract significant value from it, else you'll end up with too much information to process which will bog you down.

My least best chapter was Inventing Your Style. This felt a bit arm-wavy, though it provides plenty of examples and stresses the importance of style. The chapter redeems itself with a short section on readability at its end. "What really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude."

The most valuable chapter I found to be Working and Reworking; a lecture on early drafts and the techniques of revision. It's also the most prescriptive part of the book, and, for anyone who has wrangled a first draft into submission (or failed to!), the most instructive.

Koch's knowledge and experience is evident on each page, as is his steady, encouraging, relaxed voice. The book is a masterclass that every writer will benefit from reading.
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In 1938, a seventeen-year-old called Herschel Grynszpan shot and killed a German embassy official. Grynszpan, naive and possibly bipolar, did so in the hope that his desperate action would call attention to the increasing plight of Jews in his native Germany. Gryn­sz­pan was not only successful, but he was used as a scapegoat by the Nazis to commit Kristallnacht. The Nazis intended to put him at the centre of a massive show trial, but this never came to pass and Grynszpan's fate is ultimately unknown, although he almost certainly died in a concentration camp.

Stephen Koch does a good job of using the scant available source material to bring the lonely, hot-headed Grynszpan back to life, although at times his ruminations on Grynszpan's character get a bit florid for me. Overall, an interesting exploration of a historical event which often gets relegated to the footnotes, although I felt that some more contextualisation of l'affaire Grynszpan within the history of show trials and political theatre might well have made this a stronger book—and one whose resonances with the present day were even more apparent.… (more)