THE ICE PICK

Novelist’s Boot Camp: 101 Ways to Take Your Book from Boring to Bestseller, by Todd A. Stone. Cincinnati, Writer’s Digest Books, c2006. 309 p. $19.99. Includes illustrations, index, and Twelve-Week Novelist’s Boot Camp. ISBN: 1-58297-360-1.

If you’ve been thinking about starting a novel and haven’t gotten your act together yet, started a dozen times and never finished, or finished and stalled out on revision and rewrites, this book may be the perfect answer for you.

"The sheer size of the task of writing a novel . . . can be intimidating," says Stone. "Military tacticians face the same kind of intimidation and challenge when planning and executing complex operations." You need to follow a process "and concentrate on one task at a time."

As Stone says in the appendix, it doesn’t matter if you can’t set aside a literal twelve weeks to write or not--very few people can--you can still use the framework of his calendar to work through your novel. The important thing is to get started and establish target dates for achieving your objectives, and if it takes a year to write your book, that’s fine--at least it will be written.

Among books on how to write novels, this book definitely stands out with its khaki cover and its commanding no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners tone. Stone doesn’t suggest or persuade you, he orders you to work on your novel. In the end, of course, you get out of a book, workshop, class, or retreat what you put into it, but if you feel you need discipline, and if you can use your imagination to enter into the idea of a writing boot camp, Stone’s focused missions and drills are inspiring and refreshing. He has a wonderful sense of humor, and imparts excellent advice with simplicity, clarity, and vigor. "No sniveling allowed."

If your novel is complete, you may find the sections on revision and editing especially helpful, not only for the practical advice--like making a backup copy of your manuscript before you start revisions--but also for the simplified way of approaching your manuscript in multiple passes to find specific kinds of errors, rather than trying to find and fix everything at once.

My only complaint was the way the book was laid out. For example, in Drill 40 of Mission 3, Stone has some great advice about upgrading your character cards. Except that up to that point, he’d never mentioned character cards. Creating the basic card isn’t covered until Drill 53, Mission 5. Nor did I feel enough attention was drawn to the appendix with its twelve-week sample calendar, so that when he talks about controlling your calendar in Drill 4 of Mission 1, but fails to mention there is a sample in the appendix that will help you do that, you are left hanging. All of which means you should do a thorough reconnaissance of the book before you start and also not be surprised that there is a lot of marching and counter-marching involved as you go back and forth between sections.

"No one would expect soldiers to sit around and wait to feel the flow [of inspiration] before they went into battle. . . . A successful attack depends on a strong plan and disciplined execution. Writing your novel works the same way."

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and if it makes you sit down and "start thinking of writing your novel as a mission," allocating time and making a mission calendar, so you can "execute small tasks each day," and eventually turn your dream of writing a novel and completing it into a reality, then Stone’s the book will have accomplished its mission. And so will you!

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, July 2006.}