Others say...

"Excellent"
This is an excellent source book for any new writers. I highly recommend this and the other books in the Writers Digest Elements of Fiction Writing series.

"Utterly Useless"
This is the worst of the Elements of Fiction book series that I've read. Instead of using examples from classic works of fiction, like the other books in the series, Wood comes up with her own examples, which are poorly written and often obscure the topics she's trying to cover. Check out Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Browne & King instead, which has a much better chapter on Showing vs. Telling. Also check out How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey, which has better descriptions on how to write scenes vs. narration.

"Fluffy and elevated - not for writers with a story to tell"
Nothing in this book was usable for me. Okay, very little. If I was trying to write the next _Ethan Frome_, then this book would be perfect. Instead I write sci-fi and fantasy. I was looking for tips to improve my description of things; this book recommends describing different things. Too much emphasis on metaphor (which is a wonderful tool but a tad obvious). If you want to write in a way people might actually communicate, this book might be a waste of your time. HOWEVER, poets and pure-literary writers might find it more useful than I did.

"Description"
**Summary: Description is a great book for the aspiring author who has already studied Stein on Writing or Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

I've read many books on writing novels, books that pound in messages like show-don't-tell and avoid flashbacks like the plague. Stein on Writing and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers were great books for me when I was writing my first manuscript - and I still refer to them regularly - but now I want to advance my writing further.

Description is great for that. Instead of saying "Show-don't-tell," description teaches methods for creating a balance between showing and telling. While Wood doesn't recommend using flashbacks, like most other books, she provides tools to make flashbacks more seamless. I like her balanced approach, and I consider this a great book for the slightly more advanced author.

I only gave this book four stars because I didn't think that the examples she used were the epitome of great writing, but her examples always got her point across.

"If It Was Good Enough For Mickey Spillane, How About You."
Mickey Spillane follwed a somewhat`suspect--by modern day standards anyway--formula for setting scenes. In all his Mike Hammer novels he always devoted about a page at or near the beginning of each chapter to charging the atmosphere with description of the ace private eye's surroundings. Then, whammo! From there his stories always took off in a rat-a-tat-tat fashion for the rest of the chapter, with hardly a further hint of settings detail. A dubious practice? I wonder. His enormous sales figures would suggest that this approach worked well. ##### Sadly, there always seems to be a big segment of the novel-authorship community who write description in a condescending way, as if their audience is exclusively the typical "Book Groupie"--you know, the quiet, lonely dork who never gets invited to parties and has nothing to say except, "I told you so," and, "Have you read...?" This is why, it seems to me, that so many writers feel they have to drench the reader with movie scene after movie scene after movie scene, depriving the imagination a chance to roam--to make up for some kind of perceived "void" in the Groupie's life. ##### It's because of this "over-reach" that one of the parts of Monica Wood's Description I liked best was the emphasis on the big variety of clever, but restricted, uses of description. I stronly believe in the Plot Development Commandment IX: Thou Shalt Not Over-Describe, and was glad to see this viewpoint validated by Monica Wood.