Reviewed by Bil Howard for Readers' Favorite

Jodie Renner has done fiction writers a huge favor by compiling her blogs into Fire Up Your Fiction: An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Stories. She covers subjects that can get a story moving and not only draw the reader in, but hold their attention and keep them turning pages. She covers the issues involved with creating and keeping conflict, tension, and action burning throughout your story and showing rather than telling. She addresses how the market and the reader have changed in the past several decades and how their lack of patience no longer allows the author to wander off on detailed descriptions that did not used to bother the reader. She also discusses wordiness and the use of clichés, as well as cutting down your word count in order to get to the action and keep it moving. She also gives excellent advice on how to make your dialogue sizzle; a problem for nearly every author. All in all, this volume is packed with plenty of digestible literary protein that will feed writers and make them eager for action.

As a novelist who also has a few years behind me, I was extremely appreciative of the insights and reminders that Jodie Renner provided for me in Fire Up Your Fiction: An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Stories. Many of these lessons were taught in my literature and creative writing classes in college, but that was almost 30 years ago and I had forgotten a few things. Additionally, I was unaware of the impatience of modern readers and had been writing in a way that favored the older, more patient reader. Updating my style has become a critical focus for me. Packed with information, accurate and inspiring, Fire Up Your Fiction: An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Stories will help you transform your fiction into a more marketable product.