I would love to be able to write a book one day, and hoped this guide would set me on track to writing something good. However, the rules and ideas were so rigid that I felt like anyone following this guide would end up with a cookie-cutter version of the same book. Perhaps my own fault for thinking a step-by-step guide might equip me with the necessary knowledge to write a new and unique book. Unfortunately this left a lot to be desired, and seemed to be centred around the YA genre of books.

The book is made like a textbook, including exercises, and I'm sure it will be very helpful. This was a very detailed craft book for beginners and a resource for intermediate writers

Good, practical advice. I loved the cheat sheets and the encouragement to pay attention to detail.
Thank you for the opportunity.

This was a very detailed craft book for beginners and a resource for intermediate writers to remind them of how to organize their thoughts and write their book. I've never been able to master outlining, but this resource has given me some great ideas/considerations while planning the next book I will write.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and Books Go Social for approving my request to read and review How to Outline Your Novel by Sussu Leclerc.

As someone who has written for many years but had not written a proper outline since high school, this book was a great place to go for easy to follow instruction. The author provided a clear breakdown of how to write an outline along with examples. As a visual learner, the examples were a tremendous help.
Having an outline, regardless of how detailed it may or may not be, is an extremely useful map to follow in the writing process.
I definitely recommend this book to anyone looking to create a plan for their writing.

I believe this is an excellent resource for the writer planning to publish YA/. It's written conversationally with lots of practical tips. It is very structured and detail oriented - particularly applicable to beginners.
3.5
I received my copy through NetGalley under no obligation.

Great for people wanting to write YA fiction, the book gives a detailed outline of the novel writing process. I particularly liked the way the author used examples to illustrate their points. Good book for beginners.

This was a bit like a recipe book for writing your YA novel. In chapter 1 we need a pinch of this, in chapter two add this, finish your preparation by chapter 6, at the midway-point you need to write this...

Yes, there was some sound advice within those pages. The notes, exercises and flowcharts where good. Yet, it all felt too rigid for me, what with all the strict rules about amount of chapters, when to present which part of the story, etc.

There are many guides to writing a novel. This author approaches the subject from the standpoint of investigating as many details as possible to avoid later developmental/heavy editing. While I'm less of a details person / planner myself, I still found myself nodding along with ideas I hadn't thought of before. If you *are* a planning type, I think you'll love this book.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC for the purpose of an unbiased review!

I really enjoyed this book and found it to be extremely valuable for the important outlining step of writing. This book focuses on YA writing and uses numerous popular YA fiction to demonstrate each chapters importance to the whole story. I read though it once and went back through several chapters again to review my notes. This would be an invaluable source for anyone thinking of writing YA fiction.

A useful guide and brilliant for beginners to use to help plot their book. I found it good. Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me review this book.

This is a fantastic resource!! I recently ordered a copy for my library's writing group. If you are new to outlining this is the recipe book for you!

A really helpful guide to plotting a novel. I know that I will refer to it again and again as I am writing. Thanks to the author, Books Go Social and Netgalley for an ARC egalley.

I received some amazing tips on writing my novel! I am glad there are books that help first time novelists.

While I am not an author, I am a reviewer and thought this would be interesting as to how authors set up their stories and characters. I found it was informational regarding those points and she gives clear examples by using a few familiar books. She also gives a list of questions at the end of each chapter to give further information. Noted it is often referenced to books written for young adults.
If someone is interested in writing I suppose this book could be added to their armory in setting up the chapters.
I received this book as a complimentary copy for an unbiased review.The opinions expressed are my own.

This was a wonderful beginner guide. Very helpful for a new author with easy to follow instructions and detailed helpful tips and information. I really enjoyed reading it. I received this book from NetGalley for an honest review.

Leclerc wrote this book to learn how to "control [her] own creativity." while much of the information found in this book can be found in others, what set Leclerc's book apart is her use of concrete examples from novels and movies to illustrate her points. this is an excellent book for beginning writers.

Errata:
"Lie to his teeth" - should be lie through his teeth!
"Some characters live double lives like Peter Parker doubling as Spiderman, Bruce Waine and Batman, Buffy Summers the vampire slayer, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde..." Couple of spelling errors in there (Wayne, Jekyll)

That's a great name to have: Sussi Leclerc, who I assume is a French author who did her own translation or maybe wrote it directly in English. It's good English for the most part, a hell of a lot better than (pardon) my French, but I have to say I found this book wanting in several areas. The thing is that while I was intrigued by the premise of the book (which curiously the disclaimer depicts as a work of fiction!), I've never heard of her. I'm far from an encyclopedia of author names, but I've reviewed well over three thousand books on my website and I'd never encountered this name even tangentially. When I looked her up on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, I could find literally nothing she had written except a couple of books on how to write novels!

I have to wonder about a person who has no literary track record (unless all her work is in French and not available through two of the major outlets in the English speaking world), yet who promises to tell how to write a novel or, in this case, how to outline one. This seems to be par for the course for this kind of book though: they're always written by people you never heard of. It's very rare to have someone who is well-known - like Stephen King, for example - write a book about writing novels. Not that I'd read his, not being a fan!

If you go online and search for similar topics, such as 'how to write chapter one' for example, you will find the web is also populated with authors you may never have heard of offering advice (replete with cussing and foul language in one case, I'm sorry to report!). Maybe I just have it backwards and maybe those who write novels that become beloved are the worst teachers, and those who have apparently sold none are the best at explaining how to write something. That seems off to me, but what do I know?! I do know I shall never write a 'How To' book, rest assured!

But this is why I was intrigued and decided to review this particular one. Who knows? Maybe I can learn something. I'm always ready, but I should say up front that I'm not a fan of such books, because while you're reading endless books or attending lectures, seminars, and taking courses about writing, you're not actually writing anything yourself!

I'm a fan of reading, in great variety, what others have written and hoping, by a process of osmosis or something, that I can absorb into myself something of what made their book work, and maybe bring it out of me when writing something of my own. This has the same problem I mentioned above though: while you're reading, you're not writing! The thggn is that reading, these days, can be done anywhere, even on a ten-minute visit to the bathroom, or while waiting for a doctor's appointment, or on your lunch-break at work, if you have ebooks on your phone.

You can listen to books while driving, while cooking, while gardening, while exercising, and so on. You don't even need audiobooks to accomplish this these days since your phone will read an ebook to you; not ideally, but it works! At least on an iPhone. It's called VoiceOver and it's a pain, but once you learn to work with it, it does a decent job. The thing is though, you really need to spend at least as much time writing as you do reading.

The other problem with my technique is that one's own work risks becoming nothing more than a sorry clone of what others have written, and that's the most boring writing of all. I mean how many competition-based dystopian trilogies did Suzanne Collins inadvertently spawn when The Hunger Games became a thing? How many tedious vampire vs werewolf novels were tragically spewed-out in the wake of the twilight abomination, which for me signaled the imminent twilight of original novel writing? Such novels are tedious, and the thing is that neither Collins nor the woman who wrote that other novel and who shall remain nameless for her crimes, were copying anyone else (although you can argue that Collins was channeling Koushun Takami's Battle Royale, and the other story was in many ways a rip-off of Stoker's Dracula, but I'm not going to take that detour here.

So the real problem in reading lots of books is that you may fail distill something original from what you've been reading, and end up copying rather than learning the ropes. There is nothing worse than the tired parade of cloned YA novels we've seen over the last decade or two, and I feel that this is a weakness with this particular book, because it seems almost entirely focused on YA material, and in trying to set out rules for writing your own work, it's still playing into that same trope - rather like writing by numbers. That said, you can't simply write any old thing and expect people to embrace it as a literary masterpiece no matter how well it may be structured, because the sad truth is that far too many readers are like sheep in mindlessly buying into the clone publishing industry which rests entirely on woolly thinking.

I was right about this book teaching me something though! I quickly learned this startling revelation: "The main point is the antagonist wants the same thing as the hero, the exact same thing, only he means to get it the wrong way." I'm sorry. I don't have a degree in literature, but didn't Voldemort want to crush non-magicals whereas Harry Potter wanted to support them? Didn't the shark in Jaws want to eat people and the sheriff wanted to save them? Same for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park...and Hannibal Lecter for that matter. And is it so obvious that McMurphy wanted exactly the same thing as Nurse Ratched? Not! I'm sorry, but this struck me as completely off.

The book quickly launches into a series of chapters explaining what needs to happen in the matching chapters of your novel: chapter one should do this, chapter two that, and so on. The author does warn earlier in the book that your mileage may differ, and that in consequence, you may want to change things up a bit to match whatever it is that you're writing, but this 'by rote' (or in this case 'by wrote', maybe?!) approach seems to me to be problematical if people follow it too closely. I felt it was the wrong approach, and risked the reader writing far too rigid a novel in trying to follow this plan, at the potential cost of spoiling what otherwise might have been a free-flowing work of art.

For me this was a weakness. What if your chapters are shorter or longer? If your book has fifty short chapters then surely you can't accomplish the same thing in chapter one that the author advocates here. In such a case, you'd need to calculate the ratio of chapters and try to figure out what proportion of the book you need to get to before you can apply the specific chapter rules listed here. Percentages of the distance through your book would have been a wiser choice. The author did employ these a couple of times, but why not more often, I could not figure out; it would have been less rigid and made a lot more sense.

For me personally, the book advice was made worse by the steady diet of quotes from YA novels. I'm not a huge fan of YA although I've found many books in that category that I've enjoyed. The problem is that I've found far too many more that are precisely what this author appears to be advocating: pedantic cloning of what everyone else has done, and that makes for the most tedious reading material because your novel will sound exactly like every other YA novel in the genre, and what's to differentiate it then? This is not good writing and it sure as hell isn't going to lead to great literature (in the loosest sense of that word).

The author seemed to rotate around The Hunger Games (which I liked), Divergent (which I personally detest), Hex Hall, which I rather liked, but which isn't well known, The Coldest Girl in Cold Town which I've never heard of, a novel by a male author who I shall not identify by novel title or by name because I detest pretension in writing, and Daughter of Smoke and Bone which I liked.

There were others which I'm not listing here because they were mentioned less, but they suffered precisely the same problem: nearly all of them were YA! You will note that the bulk of these I listed are trilogies or series. Even though I liked the beginning volumes of Hex Hall and Daughter of Smoke and Bone, I never actually finished the series in each case because I grew bored; so despite liking some of them, it was annoying to have them constantly brought up.

Worse than this though was that these were all used in a positive sense. There were no negatives in this book! There were no examples of how not to outline your story or how to outline it in a non-standard way and still achieve the same effect. It was like this arbitrarily-structured pattern was the only way to go and I disagree. So do many other authors as judged from the huge variety of stories that are out there.

In this 'How To' book, there was no adjustment for example for short stories, novelettes, or novellas, nor was there any overarching view that could be taken if your novel is written as part of an arc - a trilogy (god forbid), for example. Naturally, you should write each volume with the same basic rules in mind, some of which are espoused here, but if your story is to stretch over three or (god forbid) more novels, then doesn't your overall outlining need to encompass those volumes too? That's a major reason why I found this so strange, to talk of only one volume and then use volume one of a trilogy as an example! It made no sense to me because volume one of any series is nothing more than a prologue. None of that was addressed here.

On a technical note I have to say that the copious quotations from the works listed (and others) and which I quickly took to skipping, were all done in an odd way. Instead of having the text inset to signify it was a block quote, the quotes appeared to be set in shaded squares. Maybe this would look fine in a print book, but in an ebook they didn't work so well. It was exacerbated on my phone because I always set my ebook readers to be a black page with light text rather than the other way around - a white screen with black print.

I do this because it conserves the battery, but it can produce very odd effects in books which try to go any way other than plain vanilla in their layout. What my mode of viewing did to the quotes from these various books was to set the background to little squares of pale gray, and the text to white, making the quotes pretty much illegible. As it happened in this case, this suited me: it made it easier to skip them! Note that these quotes gave major spoilers, so you might want to skip them too if you haven't read the book in question and plan on doing so.

In general the book felt like it had far too many persnickety rules and regulations, and it was far too 'busy' in appearance, making for an unpleasant read. I didn't like the approach it took, and I found it to be too set in its ways. So, while I wish the author all the best in her career, for these and other reasons listed, I have to say I was disappointed in the book, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

I found this book quite informative but it’s mainly based on a young adult type novel and would need a different approach unless that is the area you want to write in. However it is quite an interesting and helpful read to encourage you to lay out the book and how to structure chapters which is invaluable.

I was really pleased to see the amount of information within this book. It certainly tells you what to do, step by step, and when to do it. The author has also put in a LOT of work providing examples of many novels, and one day I hope to digest it all - step by step.

There were two things wrong with this book as far as I was concerned.

The first one is that it looks so ... self published. The cover looks like it was rustled up by the author and the inside doesn't seem to have had any editing done. It reads as though the author's first language wasn't English - which is great, especially when English is the only language I speak. But I do think the author should really consider paying both a jacket designer and an editor - not a proofreader, that comes later.

The second thing wrong is the actual formatting. It was inconsistent in the first place, but then the boxes and indents went all over the place. I tried to read it on both the Kindle Fire and the Kindle Paperwhite. But I'm afraid I gave up.

I won't give a poor star rating to a book I haven't read all the way through, and for that reason I won't, on this occasion, be putting my review anywhere outside of NetGalley. I'd LOVE to give the book another go once the author has polished it and paid a designer and an editor to look at it.

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me see this book, the content of which really does appeal to me.