After reading through the rest of things, and thinking about it myself (as well as buying a few of the books -- How to Write & Sell Your First Novel, and both King's and Bradbury's books) I must say that I've learned that books and segments I receive in my English class are particularly useful to me not for the reason that they tell me how to do things, but rather because they give me an idea to base my own ideas or better educate me one aspects of the novel. To tell the truth, I tend to do things my own way regardless of how I'm told to do them unless it makes sense to me and proves to work for me, otherwise I do my own thing (even if it means sacrificing a bit of my grade).
There are a few things that, when I approach my own pieces of writing, I learn that I don't have as firm a grasp on them as I had thought. I do read a lot, acclaimed authors because I find their writing to be good and their pieces interesting and not pointless like so many others that some people are into (specifically my own generation, which bothers me). Yet I have a problem with plot especially, and some of the character archetypes, so when I can get my hands on a good piece about elements of literature I like to read them so that I can better understand and thus use these elements in my own pieces (sometimes I even get ideas for my own pieces). That's the reason I like these kind of books and would caution others who are seriously starting out: don't use these as you would assembly instructions for your pool, use them instead as inspiration or materials to pick and choose from in order to create your own design or style, they'll serve you much better in this way.
With that said, I have a question for those of you who can provide me an answer: among these other books, and the majority of you seem to especially favor King's book, where would you place the Writer's Digest books in regard to their usefulness in writing?
I was looking at those which my Barnes & Noble had on their shelves and realized that if they were as good as some of these others that they might be worth my buying for later reference (that is if they have something that the others do not). I decided to get the opinions of others on this since these books were so specialized and were, on average, about fifteen bucks or something like that. I realized that they had exercises and such, but I had no intention of using those, I'm more interested in the rest of the book.
