This Year You Write Your Novel, by Walter Mosley, Little Brown and Company, 2007, 111 pages, hardcover, $19.99.

 

        Walter Mosley  is a prolific writer of at least 23 novels (he probably published another in the time it took me to write this paragraph), four nonfiction books, and numerous short stories. He’s best known for his Easy Rawlins mystery series, including Devil in a Blue Dress, which was made into a movie in the 1990s.

        The bookshelves are bursting with writing How-To books, so you may ask, Why this book? Why should I care what he has to say?

        Well, here are a few additional bits and pieces that impressed me:

 

§         Mosley sits on the National Book Award Committee.

§         His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, and Esquire.

§         He won the O’Henry Award in 1996.

 

        Mosley’s book on writing, This Year You Write Your Novel, is elegantly simple, from its stark orange cover with embossed title, to its spare 111 pages, including a seven-page index. It’s a book you could have written yourself, but the fact that you didn’t means you should read his.

                Mosley’s premise is that the way to get your novel written is …ah hum…are you ready for this? The one and only way you will write your novel, this year or any year, is to sit down and write it. He suggests you devote at least 1½ hours per day, each and every day, Monday thru  Sunday, rain or shine, work days or

 vacation days. You have to write for 1½ hour or more (Mosley works 3 hours a day) every day.

     The premise for this consistent pace is that your subconscious mind will continue to work on the novel, even when you’re not. If you let time elapse between writing sessions, your creative inner self will find something else to interest it, and you will have a difficult time coming back to your writing.

        Chapter 1 of This Year You Write Your Novel ends on page 15. You could stop there and have your money’s worth out of the book. The additional 86 pages are devoted to the elements of fiction and the process of rewriting your work.

        Should you actually get your buttocks into a chair and write your novel, Chapter 4, Rewriting, or Editing, provides some insight into how this process might be accomplished. Mosley suggests that the second draft is actually accomplished by sitting down and reading your book, from start to finish. You can do it in your 1½-hour writing time, and you can do it with pencil in hand, making small editorial changes.

        If you follow This Year You Write Your Novel’s timetable, you will probably have a first draft of your book in twelve weeks. Take another week to do the second draft, and you should have a pretty good idea of what you have accomplished, and what you need to do with it. Mosley says, “Now begins the hard work.” Well, darn. I thought I was done!