So last year, when HarperCollins announced it was publishing James Frey's next novel, Bright Shiny Morning, I felt vaguely guilty for blogging it here. Hadn't he gotten enough publicity from the memoir debacle already? Wasn't I just further rewarding -- and benefiting from -- his bad behavior? And yet, I saw that my most beloved Guardian Online had interviewed him this month, and then a comment showed up on that Bright Shiny blog posting from way back in 2007. So people are reading the new book and then even Googling it. I was intrigued. Clearly people still wanted to talk about his work, at least, and maybe that's how it should be. In any case, I wanted to find out, and a poll seemed the perfect way to do it.

And if a poll isn't enough for ya', leave a comment -- and then, depending on what box you checked, read the Guardian's spoof on the new book.)

Recently, reader Cammie wrote in asking, "I wondered if you might be able to suggest a good book on revising the first draft of a novel. It's already become clear to me that I need to develop my characters up front better, before racing through the story (which is pretty strong). But when I spent a lot of time developing character, I ended up writing pages of biographical exposition right in the middle of the story! So I need to learn how to subtly interweave character revelation with storytelling, without letting it drag (which, to me, sounds about as easy as sticking an elephant through a pin hole!)"

I wrote back: "I had similar problems with my book and found it helpful to turn to classic works of literature that have things in common with my book to see how they did it. Since your book is very plot-oriented, you might try something like Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen puts her reader at the heart of the plot immediately, and yet the dialogue's so revelatory that you never feel anything's missing in terms of character development. (If dialogue isn't your strong suit, look around for another writer who shares your strengths, to see how they use them.)

"Francine Prose has a good book about how to read books for this purpose. I know this sounds like a much more labor-intensive way of learning, but I don't know of a how-to book that really answers this question."

And yet screenwriters have Story, which seems to basically do this. I wanted to turn this question to a wider audience, in part to see if others had books that had helped them. But I also wondered if, as creative writers, we really want a formula? Screenplays have to be somewhat formulaic, right, but do we really want that for our novels?