How to Write Fiction Like a Pro: A Simple-to-Savvy Toolkit for Aspiring Authors

by Robert Newton Peck

In How to Write Fiction Like a Pro: A Simple-to-Savvy Toolkit for Aspiring Writers, celebrated author Robert Newton Peck provides emerging writers with the power tools they need to start building their own books. Readers will learn everything from pacing a story and writing dialogue that flows to molding the tangible "stuff" of life into characters and storylines of fiction.

How is written in the straightforward, earthy, and humorous voice that fans of Rob's fiction have come to know and love. Informative but not preachy, How's lighthearted style immediately engages readers, inspiring them to take up the tools and write from their own lives and their own strengths.

Learning isn't a load. It's laughter.

Aspiring authors are sure to learn—and laugh—as they discover How to Write Fiction Like a Pro.

Genres: Writing

148 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2006

About the author

Robert Newton Peck is an American author of books for young adults. His titles include Soup and A Day No Pigs Would Die. He claims to have been born on February 17, 1928, in Vermont, but has refused to specify where. Similarly, he claims to have graduated from a high school in Texas, which he has also refused to identify. Some sources state that he was born in Nashville, Tennessee (supposedly where his mother was born, though other sources indicate she was born in Ticonderoga, New York, and that Peck, himself, may have been born there). The only reasonably certain Vermont connection is that his father was born in Cornwall.

Peck has written over sixty books including a great book explaining his childhood to becoming a teenager working on the farm called: A Day no Pigs would Die

He was a smart student, although his schooling was cut short by World War II. During and shortly after the conflict, he served as a machine-gunner in the U.S. Army 88th Infantry Division. Upon returning to the United States, he entered Rollins College, graduating in 1953. He then entered Cornell Law School, but never finished his course of study.

Newton married Dorothy Anne Houston and fathered two children, Anne and Christopher. The best man at the wedding and the godfather to the children was Fred Rogers of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood fame.

A Day No Pigs Would Die was his first novel, published in 1972 when he was already 44 years old. From then on he continued his lifelong journey through literature. To date, he has been credited for writing 55 fiction books, 6 nonfiction books, 35 songs, 3 television specials and over a hundred poems.

Several of his historical novels are about Fort Ticonderoga: Fawn, Hang for Treason, The King's Iron.

In 1993, Peck was diagnosed with oral cancer, but survived. As of 2005, he was living in Longwood, Florida, where he has in the past served as the director of the Rollins College Writers Conference. Peck sings in a barbershop quartet, plays ragtime piano, and is an enthusiastic speaker. His hobby is visiting schools, "to turn kids on to books."

—From Wikipedia

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-n...

Reviews

[L · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some people are under the mistaken belief that they can write, they can teach everyone based on how they write. While this book has some good points, far too much of it would work only for his own style, and following his rules would be out of place, or copying his storytelling. The rest is the basics you can find in literally any other how-to writing book.

Sorry, Peck. You may have written over sixty novels as you keep reminding us, but telling Joe Blow writer to give them silly names and add extra action won't help someone trying to write a literary novel or literally anything else that isn't your established genre and style.

[William Visher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very useful information as well as a delight to read.