There are many ways prospective authors routinely sabotage their own work. Misstep by misstep, How Not to Write a Novel shows how you can ensure your manuscript never rises above the level of unpublishable sputum, that the characters in your opus are unpleasant, dimensionless versions of yourself, that your plot is digressive, tedious and unconvincing, and that your style is reliant on mangled clichés and misplaced showpieces of sesquipedalian vocabulary. Alternately, you can use it to identify the most common mistakes, avoid them and actually write a book that works. Guardian Award shortlisted novelist Sandra Newman and ghost-writer extraordinaire Howard Mittlemark (but if we told you which books we'd have to kill you) have distilled 30 years of teaching, editing, writing and reviewing fiction into a hilarious and liberating guide that is the perfect read for anyone who's ever laughed at a badly written piece of prose and for anyone who's ever penned one - and doesn't want to do it again.