Dorchester Abbey Oxfordshire: The Archaeology and Architecture of a Cathedral, Monastery and... Book

There are some good observations about writing here, but the presentation is rather disjointed--Vandenburgh admits to having trouble organizing her thoughts in the acknowledgements. She goes about drafting novels in a very free-form, unstructured way (nothing wrong with that!), but I think this approach works against her in a non-fiction book about writing. My biggest barrier to gleaning information from this book is the fact that nearly half of it is an extended encyclopedia of writing terms. There are some standards here, like "conflict", "empathy", and "evil", but also invented terms and phrases I wouldn't have known to look up, such as "the way we name a river" (under W) and "your story's needs" (under Y). This forces you to read the encyclopedia chronologically--I noticed terms are re-referenced only in later sections, which seems to confirm my decision to read this way--and yet, reading an encyclopedia like this can be downright dull. There are some great little gems hidden in here (I liked "revelation" and "fairy tale"), but I found it hard to retain the disjointed, alphabetical list. Some definitions are lengthy, spreading over multiple paragraphs or pages, while others are overly vague and much too short. I think it would be more beneficial to read the books referenced here instead: Wood's "How Fiction Works", Lamott's "Bird by Bird", King's "On Writing", Forrester's "Aspects of the Novel".