Howard Mittelmark

I moved to NYC in the eighties to be where they made books, and I've been working in publishing, either writing or editing, pretty much ever since. About ten years ago, I took everything I figured out reading hundreds, possibly thousands, of published and unpublished novels, and wrote How Not To Write A Novel with Sandra Newman. It's sort of an encyclopedia of mistakes every beginning writer makes. It's very funny. Really. You should take my word for it. However, if you're just not that kind of person, you can read some excerpts at the website. I can't guarantee you'll write a good novel if you read it, but it would be very hard not to write a better novel. I used to review a lot: many, many books for Kirkus Reviews, and also for newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. So I have all these reviews sitting on my hard drive, and I thought I'd post some of them here, which I'm mentioning to explain why some of my reviews read exactly like reviews that were written for Kirkus.