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There are so many books on novel writing it's overwhelming.

If I spent all the available time and limited use of my eyesight I have reading all these books I would never actually write anymore.

Books with formulas may work for some and I say more power to ya. The way my brain works must just be different.

For me it's like taking dictation when the writing is going well. My characters tell me the story and I just take it down for them. Now if there's a how to book on how to control them when they hijack a story maybe I should get that one. Then again that is the true joy in writing for me- being surprised by the characters.

I'm sure that there are those who feel their writing gets better from the exercises and such in these books (and there are tons of websites too) but not so for me- I've found the only way to really improve my writing is to write as much as I can and read writers that inspire me. Writing with other people has been a great way too to push the writing I do on my own.

I believe technical skills can be taught but there's something more to the art that can't be.

Look at it this way-not everyone can get up on stage and sing a perfect, heartbreaking aria. Some people can, others have different talents.

No amount of book reading or singing lessons will turn you into Josh Groban if you can't carry a tune (as American Idol has shown us all).

All people have talent- just not the same talents and some things cannot be taught. Honed with teaching, yes. However that something more seems to just be there in the writers I love to read…it's magic.

Thank goodness for variety in talent. If everyone was a writer no one would act out the story when the film rights are sold and it's turned to a screenplay.

I wish I could ask the late Douglas Adams what he would think of all these how-to books…

Of course writing can be taught. Most of us are taught the basics of writing in school. Why should that learning (by any means) stop at the point at which someone thinks they'd like to write a novel?

It's what the student decides to do with the information that matters most.

There are some writing skills that can be taught, such as the rules of grammar. There are others that must be learned by trial and error, such as recognizing when it is more effective to break a rule than to follow it.

I also wonder how much of these manuals are about instruction, and how much are about sharing and encouragement.

But then a few years ago, an editor who had requested one of my manuscripts and was very excited at first rejected in the end, but send me a 3-page evaluation of what worked and what didn't work. One of his complaints was that he saw structural problems that would be difficult (time-consuming/costly) to edit, so the very first writing guide I bought was "Scene and Structure" by Jack Bickham. It taught me a lot and is still one of my favorite guides today (of a very short list).

Incidentally, it's also a guide that many reviewers on Amazon claim teaches "formulaic writing." I disagree. How can a sound scene structure be formulaic? Sometimes I wonder if they read the same book, or read it in the same way. Possibly, when they hear the repeated demand that every scene must contain conflict, they think fights and explosions, whereas I interpret it as any conflict of interest and think of the six-part BBC series of "Pride and Prejudice" (conflict in every scene, seriously!) And why should writing be formulaic just because your scenes have a scene goal, development that actually focuses on achieving that goal, and conclusion? Of course, there's always a good and a clumsy way to incorporate such "rules." Good scene structure is something a reader notices only when it's absent. For me, figuring out the scene goal helped me realize what a scene was really about and it made my writing much tighter, the scene so much more focused. Understanding scene structure left me free to focus on the story.

My other favorite writing guides are "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" by Renni Browne and Dave King, which helped me improve my dialogue, and "Description" by Monica Wood. (One of my most trustworthy beta-readers commented that she sometimes found my description overdone/boring/too much.)

Then several male readers called my female MC's male sidekick a wimp, among other things, so I searched two guides on characters for ideas on how to fix that problem: "Characters & Viewpoint" by Orson Scott Card (my favorite when it comes to tips on how to make a character more likeable) and "Heroes and Heroines: sixteen Master Archetypes" by Cowden/LaFever/Viders (for screen writers). I don't use archetypes but the book helped me realize that my male sidekick was so ill-defined I couldn't even say which of 3 of the 8 presented male archetypes he was closest to — no wonder my beta-readers couldn't relate to him or figure out what sort of person he was.

By now I have 33 writing manuals, only ten of which I find helpful — and those I bought AFTER realizing that my writing lacked in that area. When trying to fix a particular problem, writing manuals are much more helpful than reading literature. (Only four of the 33 I found to be utter rubbish, though.)

So I changed my opinion about writing manuals 180°, but I had a finished manuscript before consulting them and already knew what parts of writing came natural to me and where I still struggled. Nowadays, I can't understand why anyone would reject the idea of asking advice from the experts.

I, however, use it as a painter uses his thumb; when my story is done, I hold up the 12 steps of THE HERO'S JOURNEY to prove my proportions are believable.

I rarily change things, however, so I don't know why I still do it. But when a story seems to have all the right body parts in the correct order, I say to myself, "See? Natural genius. Time for bubbles."