THE ICE PICK

The Weekend Novelist, by Robert J. Ray. New York : Dell, 1994. ISBN 0-440-50594-1. $10.95.

If you want to write a novel, but don’t have a clue where to start or how to organize your ideas, this book, billed as "a dynamic 52-week program to help you produce a finished novel . . . one weekend at a time," may be just what you need.

It begins with the most basic concepts and then leads you into and through the actual writing of the story. It is, however, not for the faint-hearted, but is a very concentrated and demanding book, requiring strong self-discipline.

The first fourteen lessons are devoted to creating your characters, setting your scenes, and working out your plot. If you already have characters in mind and a story knocking around in your head, you may want to skip these. I’d advise skimming them instead, as there are many terrific hints, bits of advice, and exercises that may help you strengthen your novel or give you ideas.

Ray has you start the actual drafting of your story by writing your key scenes in six lessons or weekends. Then he has you write what he calls the "discovery" draft in eleven weekends, the "meditation" draft in fourteen weekends, and the "final" draft in seven weekends. In the discovery, or first draft, you write fast, just getting the story down on paper. With the meditation draft, you reshape, rework, and rewrite--tightening action, fixing dialogue, rebuilding settings, deepening and developing the story. In the final draft, you cut and polish.

It will be helpful to have a paperback copy of Anne Tyler’s Accidental Tourist on hand, since Ray uses that as a model to study, but the relevant parts are quoted in entirety, and it is not a necessity.

Nor is it necessary to confine yourself to working only on weekends, if you have the time. (I didn’t, and it took me three years to work my way through the book.)

Ray also advocates keeping a notebook in which to "store your creativity." In this, you do the weekly exercises, keep dialogues, ideas, images, inspiring pictures or quotes, lists, notes to yourself, plot diagrams, and scenes to be written.

The book lacks any kind of an index, which drove me crazy when I wanted to refer to something. But it does have a bibliography of both how-to-write books and classic works for writers to read and study and an excellent glossary of writing terms, as well as tips on how to find a publisher for your novel.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, Oct. 1999.}