"How not to write a novel" by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark (Penguin 2009)

The authors point out that it's easier to agree on what writers shouldn't do than what they should do. They mention some things to avoid, some of which I'm been guilty of -

• "The Waiting Room" - Avoid creating scenes merely as places where a character remembers or mulls over background information (p.8)
• "The Long Runway" In which a character's childhood is recounted to no purpose" (p.9)
• "The Gum on the Mantelpiece" - something (often in the first scene) that seems as if it's going to be significant, but is only incidental
• Having the main character looking in a mirror as a way to justify describing them, or having them look at a photo - "As he passed the mirror, Joe noticed the blond hair and square-jawed features that had always won his attention from the girls. Then he saw, wedged in the mirror's corner, a photo of Melinda. Her pretty face was lusciously framed by long straight cinnamon hair and medium-sized but perfectly shaped breasts."

They point out how useful it is for the main straight character to have a gay best friend - they provide fe/male prospective; a nonthreatening shoulder to cry on; comic mix-ups and misunderstandings; proof of main character's sophistication; source of campy, clever, witty dialog

Many comments that they make ring true -

• "John Kennedy Toole [] unable to find a publisher for his novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, took his own life. Thereafter, his mother relentlessly championed the book, which was eventually published to great acclaim and earned him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for fiction". (p.vii)
• "In commercial fiction, if you wish to use an omniscient point of view, you must first create an authorial voice that belongs to the omniscient narrator, not to any (or all) of the characters" (p.163)
• "the author should 'check in' with the point-of-view character's thoughts and feeling every so often, even when nothing dramatic is happening" (p.176)
• "The manuscripts of unpublished authors are often rife with passages in which the protagonist takes stock of his life" (p.178)
• "While sex and humor are both very difficult to realize on the page, it is all too easy to realize humor while trying to realize sex" (p.229)

They point out that random, unlikely, unprepared-for, badly-timed events happen in real life, but they're not accepted by readers. Readers might use an inappropriate (literary) reading strategy if the novel tries to be realistic.