Leave it in the sock drawer Kate Saunders considers a cruel but wickedly useful checklist for would-be novelists

Your novel. Four hundred pages of excitement, passion and sly social comment, currently languishing in your sock drawer. You poured into it everything you had; your immediate family loved it; your friends couldn't put it down.

1. How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs If You Ever Want to Get Published
2. by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark
3. pp262,
4. Penguin,
5. £9.99
6. 

1. Buy How Not To Write A Novel at the Guardian bookshop

So why won't anyone publish it? Is it a) because the literary world is a members-only clique dedicated to keeping out new talent; b) because publishers and agents are chronically lazy and simply couldn't be bothered to read to the amazing ending, which is the entire point of the story; or c) because it's a load of pony from start to finish.

You know the answer as well as I do, but you won't be told. You have read manuals about how to write novels, you may even have attended a writer's group. Still, like Belshazzar at the feast, you understood not the writing on the wall. Well, here it is again, in bigger letters. To find out exactly how your work has been weighed in the balance and found wanting, read How Not to Write a Novel, in which Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark list all the essential components of the classic stinker.

Newman and Mittelmark add to this one piece of advice so priceless that it is worth all the others put together: "The more good writing you read, the better a writer you might become."

All good writers are brilliant readers. If you can't be bothered to trawl through the canon, because James and Dickens and Nabokov and all those guys are too difficult, you really should consider taking up another hobby. If you're still burning to publish a novel, however, you could start your reading list with this hilarious, wickedly observed and deeply useful guide.