Elizabeth George's Write Away is, bar none, the best book I've found on how-to-write-fiction. A left-brained person trying to do a right-brained activity, George has developed an analytic method for freeing her inner artist, and the result could help any writer. I attended a workshop George gave on revising. It was brilliant. Very simple: a "fast read," an editorial letter to oneself, one revision, a "cold reader," and a second revision. When I left the workshop, I went straight to the conference bookstore to buy Write Away. So did many others, and the book sold out in an hour. For beginning writers, especially, this is a book beyond value. If you can only buy one, this is the book you want because she covers every aspect of the process: finding an idea, developing real characters, plotting, drafting and revising. She even summarizes several different methods of organizing plot (including my personal favorite, The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler). She said a number of things I've never heard before. For instance, every thing that happens should cause something else to happen later in the book. If a scene is not the "cause" for a later "effect," out it goes, regardless how pretty it might be. One of my favorite sections was a discussion on how to organize scenes: full scene, dramatic narration (summarized or complete), or partial scene mixed with narration. Within a full scene, there's "motion picture technique," "sound versus sight," "present-past-present," or leaping right in, "in media res." You get the point. This is a whole box full of tools (and a reminder that the most critical tool is "bum glue:" something that sticks your bottom in your chair). Like any method, this won't work for every writer. It's extremely detailed and full of rules. For example, she eschews character charts, preferring to create characters with a stream of consciousness flow of words until her gut tells her it's right. This gives her right brain control, she says. And I agree. In fact, I use a very similar method, but in paragraphs organized by topic. But then I transfer the hard details to a chart. If I just want to remember what color a character's eyes are, I don't want to read through paragraphs of SOC prose when I can look at one spot on one page of a familiar chart. But George herself tells us "If there's one rule about writing, it's that there are no rules," and "Every writer has to develop her own process." So feel free to take the tools that work for you and tuck them into your own toolbox. 'Cause if you're writing fiction, you'll find a lot of tools to choose from here, and some of them will fit into your hand like they were formed there.