Author: Joseph Bates

ISBN: 13: 978-1-58297-8846-8: 10: 1-58297-846-8

Publisher: Writer's Digest Books

Click Here To Purchase The Nighttime Novelist: Finish Your Novel in Your Spare Time

We have all heard of the famous authors that held day time jobs and wrote novels during their spare time as Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Grisham, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, J.K.Rowling, Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, and thousands of others. And as Joseph Bates points out in The Nighttime Novelist: Finish Your Novel in Your Spare Time there are actually only a handful of writers that can boast that they make a living solely by their fiction.

To help you join the ranks of the famous and not so famous authors who didn't give up their day jobs, Bates has put together an excellent book filled with mini-lessons that will provide you with the tools to make the most of your precious writing time.

The Nighttime Novelist divides itself into three parts providing a road map that will present techniques that break down the elements of the novel. There are lessons that aid you in anticipating and overcoming roadblocks, as well as how to go deeper into your novel exploring the more nuanced aspects of storytelling. In addition, there are more than twenty-five interactive worksheets that help you reinforce the principles and apply the lessons to your own project. Basically, readers are shown how to craft the opening, and then go on to develop and complete a novel, wherein you build a fictitious world line by line, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, until you have reached certain objectives resulting in a compelling novel.

Readers are introduced in the first part to developing initial ideas, character concepting, plot planning, narration, building a world: description and setting, opening scene and first-act structure. This part is followed by a Coffee Break with a list of character and plot checks that prod you into looking back at what you have established in the beginning of your novel. For example, does the protagonist have a clear motivation, or desire? Is your plot built around the continual raising, releasing, and re-raising of tension? Does your novel begin with a compelling hook? From here Bates moves onto the crafting and maintaining suspense, complicating your characters and pivotal scenes, plotting and pacing. Again there is a Coffee Break where we have a list of points to consider concerning character and plot checks. The final part of the book explores the art of closing well and it is here where we learn about the shape and function of the third act, accounting for the unaccountable, the role of theme, plotting for payoff, coming full circle, revision, and the final Coffee Break listing elements to consider for your ending.

Technically, The Nighttime Novelist: Finish Your Novel in Your Spare Time is superbly organized, written in an engaging style that has just the right formula of instruction and fun. Moreover, the design is an outstanding feature of the book with Bates' generous use of colorful pages that are combined with pictorial content, tables and sidebars that wrap the whole book up in a presentation that is extremely pleasing to the eye. As for the text, it is very informative covering a wide range of topics.

Joseph Bates holds a Ph.D in comparative literature and fiction writing from the University of Cincinnati and he currently teaches creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His writings have appeared in The South Carolina Review, Identity Theory, Lunch Hour Stories, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, and Novel & Short Story Writer's Market.


Click Here To Purchase The Nighttime Novelist: Finish Your Novel in Your Spare Time