Dear Ally, How Do You Write a Book? by Ally Carter: Worth it?

Dear Ally, How Do You Write a Book? by Ally Carter: Worth it?

By Haylee Crapo

Want to learn how to publish a novel? Got a burning question about how to create better characters? Or are you just curious about how a book starts from a thought in a person’s mind to a physical object you can hold in your hands? This book answers every single one of those questions, and then ones you’ve never even thought of before.

In this non-fiction book by Ally Carter, a New York Times bestselling author, Carter walks the reader through the process of having writing as your career, and how to be able to do it successfully. She draws from her own experiences, using her own novels as examples, but then includes other author’s advice (Holly Black, Cassandra Claire, etc) into the book for other input. She touches on everything from how to actually write a good book, all the way to if teenagers are taken seriously in the business, and if teenagers should be publishing or not. Every single page is filled with writing advice from both Carter and others, all nicely split up into neat chapters.

I will be the first to say that I am biased–I plan on making writing a career, so this book helped me personally with a all of questions that I had about becoming an author and how to write a good story. Carter walks the reader through the process of writing beautifully, and I understood everything she said every step of the way. She is clear, concise, and I wanted to annotate every little detail that I read (which is saying a lot–I’m not the biggest fan of annotations, but that’s not the topic here). Carter manages to explain a complicated area of work in a simple way, all the while keeping up a peppy demeanor that kept me hooked and never bored.

Even if you don’t want to make your writing a career, I still recommend reading this book. It’s chock full with information that could even help in just your regular English class! It will make you learn, but in a way that you won’t even realize that you’re learning, it’s that enticing and fun to read. For a book on only writing advice, it drew me in much more than I thought, and it will most likely do the same for you.

6/6 stars!!