Parisian Phoenix Publishing

I finished Janet Evanovich’s How I Write, and I expected it to disappoint. Evanovich reports in the book that it takes laborious effort to make her Stephanie Plum novels read so simply. So, like the easy tone of her fiction, her writing craft book is also conversational. The book released in 2006 when the Stephanie Plum series had completed a dozen volumes— and one of Evanovich’s schticks is to name the book the number where it falls in the series.

As of this writing, Evanovich is in her eighties or close to it and she’s written THIRTY-ONE novels about Stephanie Plum, the not-so-talented bounty hunter who will always be thirty-years-old.

I should have known, and more accurately I should say I did suspect, that any writing book where a best-selling author gets top billing but lists a co-author would not be groundbreaking advice that fuels anyone’s MFA aspirations. But in the opening, Evanovich explains that she didn’t write the book. Her daughter and the author merely organized the material from Evanovich’s website where she regularly answered fan questions.

So the book discusses, as the title clearly states, how Evanovich writes. Now she does have a few really great pieces of advice, and she also presents a heap of out-of-date wisdom.

I feel obligated to go check out some Janet Evanovich books out of the library because with everything I’ve read about her process and from the reviews of this book (written primarily by fans), she’s like the band who had the one-hit-wonder that she somehow kept repeating for decades. It reminds me of Danielle Steele. She had quite the longstanding legacy but her books were skeletal, had a formulaic plot and merely altered something about the characters in each new version.

Unless you really have no idea how to start writing, don’t bother with this one.