How I Became a Famous Novelist

[StardogChampion]

http://www.amazon.com/How-I-Became-Famous-Novelist/dp/0802170609

Steve Hely needed to know how to write very well in order to write as miserably as he does in “How I Became a Famous Novelist.” In a satirical novel that is a gag-packed assault on fictitious best-selling fiction, Mr. Hely, who has been a writer for David Letterman and “American Dad,” takes aim at genre after genre and manages to savage them all. You are invited to trawl the mass-market fiction in your local bookstore if you think Mr. Hely is making much up.

With that, Mr. Hely is off to the races. He has Pete start analyzing popular books to see what makes them sell. That gives Mr. Hely a pretext to lard “How I Became a Famous Writer” with a wide array of supposedly viable titles, main characters, ad lines (“Blood is the new pink”) and crazy premises. Sample thriller plot: “A New York City cop discovers that some Hasidic Jews have found a long-lost 11th commandment that changes everything.”

Here are some sample titles from Mr. Hely’s version of the New York Times best-seller list, which is mimicked with particular glee: “Cumin: The Spice That Changed the World,” “Indict to Unnerve,” “The Jane Austen Women’s Investigators Club” and “Sageknights of Darkhorn.” The list also includes a sci-fi novel with the following synopsis: “In a post-nuclear future inhabited by intelligent cockroaches, Lieutenant Cccyxx discovers there was once a race of sentient humans.”

At the risk of shamelessly cannibalizing Mr. Hely’s humor, here are a few more. Sample military adventure title: ‘Talon of the Warshrike.” Sample writerly process: the author of “Warshrike” explains that he got a plot idea while in Venice with his ex-wife; while on a night cruise he looked back at the city and thought, ‘What if somebody blew this place up?’” Finally and most lovably, there is this suspenseful moment from a brisk novel in which a president of the United States is warned about a national security crisis: “Sir, how much do you know about outer space?”

Someone buy this and tell me if it's any good.

 

[AtomicSpark]

http://books.google.com/books?id=Lv...Became+a+Famous+Novelist#v=onepage&q=&f=false

 

[Sheepo]

Reminds me of A Damn Fine Novel, a short story/essay by Orson Scott Card. It's quite hilarious, I don't know about this.