Product Description

Many aspiring and experienced novelists toss out hundreds of pages (and waste valuable time) before they have a workable first draft of a novel. With Karen Wiesner's book, those days are over. In this guide, readers will find:

-A systematic method for completing a detailed first draft in just thirty days -Sure-fire methods to reduce time-intensive rewrites and avoid writing detours -Comprehensive, detailed, and interactive worksheets to make the process seem less like work and more like a game

Flexible and customizable, this revolutionary system can be modified to fit any writer's approach and style.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #184182 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781582972961
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Karen Wiesner is a novelist and member of Romance Writers of America. She is a frequent guest at writers conferences and the author of Electronic Publishing.

Customer Reviews

Very misleading title
"First Draft In 30 Days: A Novel Writer's System for Building a Complete and Cohesive Manuscript" is what it's called but this is not the result the book actually provides. If you follow this method, after 30 consecutive days of work, you will NOT have a first draft or a manuscript at all. What you'll have is a complete OUTLINE of - to quote the book - 60 to 100 pages!

Days 1-6: Preliminary outlines and sketches
Days 7-13: Research
Days 14-15: Story evolution (ideas for beginning, middle, end)
Days 16-24: Formatted outline
Days 25-28: Evaluating the strength of theoutline
Days 29-30: Revising outline - and on Day 30, you're to put this outline "on a shelf for at least two weeks to several months."

The worksheets in the appendix are similar to those in "The Marshall Plan" (an author also of the crime/suspense/thriller genres) and, although this author says you can apply it to any genre, the book leans heavily towards suspense fiction. (Romance is an "optional" plot thread, for example, and her worksheets have headings like "character/suspect".)

For mystery, suspense, and thriller fiction where plots are intricate and have tons of crucial details, this method may be a useful way to track all that. For writers who use outlines as a guideline only and/or who stray from it if the work evolves in a new direction, this is a lot of "writing before the writing" that may not prove to be all that productive in the long run.

Wiesner has all of her ducks in a row
Don't let Karen Wiesner's romance background scare you away. This woman is a professional, and she's got some sensible suggestions.

According to her bio, she's written over twenty books, including such diverse genres as romance, mystery/police procedural, suspense, thriller, paranormal, and action/ adventure. Perhaps even more impressive is her planning acumen. Wiesner is always two, three novels ahead of the game, thanks to her formatted outline.

Many writers either can't or don't want to outline their novels in advance (See Tony Hillerman, for instance). Wiesner couldn't either at first until she developed the formatted outline. Wiesner refers to the formatted outline as the first draft of the book. When she revises, she revises the outline rather than suffer through countless drafts of the manuscript.

This woman is a real left-brainer. She plans virtually everything, including time to let the manuscript marinate. The appendices include character, setting, plot, and research outlines as well as a place to write potential interview questions for possible experts and your characters. Her story evolution worksheet is almost as helpful as the formatted outline.

And-oh,yes-I almost forgot Chapter eight. It's for us poor shleps who already have a completed manuscript with all kinds of holes. She shows us how to use her system to salvage the mess.

As one who has endured twenty-three drafts on his first effort, Wiesner's FIRST DRAFT IN 30 DAYS is a godsend.

30-Day Outline
Whoever the book titlers are at Writer's Digest, they should be ashamed of themselves. A 30-day outline is a far cry from a 30-day draft. The first draft--the "rough" draft of your book--must be the most painstakingly thought out and executed of all the drafts, be there two, three, five, or six more to follow. It's here, right in the beginning, that you develop your story flow, your pulse, your synthesis of surroundings with characthers and their actions / reactions within the disciplined framework of your plot. I'm sure most successful novelists would tell you that. In no way can a 30-day outline be labeled a 30-day draft. These are two separately, pronouncedly different and distinct writing phases. ##### I have always been a firm believer in outlines, and have always developed one for every one of my books (including my novel, Six Hours Past Thursday). In no way can you, as a writer, feel that you are somehow going to be led by some spontaneous, invisible hand through the jungle of story creation, be it fiction or non-ficion. To me, outlines form the basics of essentialism for a writer. ##### To flip the coin to the other side--objective analysis of Karen Wiesner's First Draft In 30 Days from the standpoint of content--it is first rate. There is nothing arbitrary or random about her call for a tightly-disciplined approach to book creation. Dispersing learned counsel in rapid-fire bursts, she lays out a good sequence for outlining your book. Preliminary thoughts, research, story evolution, formatted outline, evaluate strength, a revistation, and, importantly, putting it on a shelf for a quiet period of rest and final reflection before proceeding into the first draft. A good pecking order. ##### My lone objection is to the misleading title. Hence, the 3-star rating.