The Weekend Novelist

The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray is a method of writing a novel in one year by working on the weekends. A lot of people want to write, believe they could write “the Great American Novel”, if only they had the time. You do have the time, according to this book. It takes you step by step through a creation process that will give you a completed novel in one year.

I will most likely pick up a copy of this book, because it has a lot of good ideas. The problem is, it’s so programmed, so sterile that it’s hard to think of writing as fun. Sure, it advises you to write with abandon nearly every weekend – for ten minutes at a time. It’s not as bad as an instruction manual for sex would be, but it’s dry and sees all novels as having the same recipe.

On the other hand, the three and a half novels I’ve written aren’t good enough yet to be published and could do with some improving that I couldn’t figure out on my own. This book will be an excellent guide for me to improve those novels I’ve written. I’ve had the fun of writing, and now I’ll use the cookie-cutter book to help me shape things up. Not a bad thing at all.

One word of caution – if you don’t like having novels spoiled for you, their ends revealed before you read them, then read “The Great Gatsby” and “The Accidental Tourist” before picking up this book.

If writing a novel is one of your dreams, you can make it come true. And when you’ve made one dream come true, the others don’t seem quite so impossible. With that in mind, your Future can become very bright indeed.