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Is Life Like This?: A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months
“[Dufresne’s] generous, wise, cajoling, stern, and compassionate voice will get you working right away.”—Brad Watson
“Writing a novel,” says John Dufresne, “is not as easy as you may have thought before you tried. But it’s also not as difficult as you imagined.” Dufresne’s smart, practical, hard-nosed guide is for the person who has always wanted to write a novel but has been daunted by the sometimes chaotic, always challenging writing process. A patient teacher and experienced writer, Dufresne focuses his expertise and good humor on helping aspiring novelists take their first tentative steps. His six-month program variously calls attention to the key elements of good fiction writing and offers exercises that are designed to sharpen writers’ command of novel-length storytelling. After six months of guided writing, the users of this book will finish what might have once seemed impossible—a rich and compelling first draft of a novel.
Is Life Like This? may well be the most important addition to the aspiring writer’s library.
- GenresWritingNonfictionCrafts
314 pages, Hardcover
First published January 17, 2010
42 people are currently reading
259 people want to read
About the author
John Dufresne
50 books143 followersJohn Dufresne teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at Florida International University. He is a French-Canadian born in America.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
January 24, 2011
I'm not a big fan of the "Write a novel in X amount of time" books. I don't think writing, remarkable writing, can be accomplished by formula alone. So with that in mind I was skeptical about this book. After finishing it, I was pleased to find that it was much more about a philosophy of novel writing than simply a step-by-step guide to pushing out a novel. While the author does borrow heavily from other writers as well as other books on writing, I do consider there to be enough original thoughts and information here to be helpful. I've read dozens of books on writing and this one made me think about my own ideas of writing as much as any of the others.
November 21, 2025
i like this one! he talks in circles fairly often and there are sooo many writing exercises at the end of each chapter (which isn't a bad thing! but i just couldn't be bothered to read through all of them every single time). it's like a writer's self help book lol he is very encouraging and supportive, which is actually kinda nice
April 21, 2010
Having little formal training in writing prose, I came to John Dufresne’s Is Life Like This? A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months as an interested skeptic. Six months? Reading this guide, I realized how many erroneous preconceptions I had of the novel-writing process. The method Dufresne lays out jettisons the idea of sitting down, starting at page one and plowing through page after chronological page until you get to the end:
“Writing a novel does not proceed in a linear fashion even if the novel itself eventually does. Writing a novel is messy; it’s labyrinthine at times; it’s recursive and indirect; it sputters and lurches and frustrates and generates.”
Read more at http://rantsravesreviews.homestead.co...
“Writing a novel does not proceed in a linear fashion even if the novel itself eventually does. Writing a novel is messy; it’s labyrinthine at times; it’s recursive and indirect; it sputters and lurches and frustrates and generates.”
Read more at http://rantsravesreviews.homestead.co...
December 4, 2010
Good one to start with, if you're just beginning to write fiction. This book is heavy on the creativity and imagination aspect of writing, but very little help on the actual mechanics of how to write engaging fiction.
Contains lots of ways to evaluate books you've read and ways to practice and develop your own writing. A useful text.
Contains lots of ways to evaluate books you've read and ways to practice and develop your own writing. A useful text.
January 3, 2013
This is, by far, the best book on novel writing that I've read. It is part self-help (as in, how do I do it?), part exercises, and part essay on writing.
I used this book in a Novel Writing class this fall and the students liked it as well.
He has lots of great exercises and great advice for writers in general.
Highly recommended!
I used this book in a Novel Writing class this fall and the students liked it as well.
He has lots of great exercises and great advice for writers in general.
Highly recommended!
December 1, 2025
There is a point, somewhere in the middle of John Dufresne’s “Is Life Like This?”, when you realise that the book has quietly stopped being a how–to manual and has become, instead, a companion. Not a cheerleader – he is far too wry and unsentimental for that – but a tough, funny, unembarrassed writing teacher leaning across the table to say: Look, here is what it takes to get a novel written. Not in theory, not in the mist of “someday”, but over the next six months of your actual life.
On its surface, “Is Life Like This?” is a schedule. Dufresne divides the project of a first novel into 26 weeks, each with its own theme and a cluster of exercises. Week 1 asks you to collect words and sentences like a magpie. By Week 12 you are writing a one–page synopsis and taking the temperature of the pages you already have. By Weeks 21 to 24, he is shoving you toward a complete, messy first draft, insisting that a careful first draft is a failed one, that your job is to know less than you think you need to and keep going anyway. The architecture is reassuringly concrete: do this on Monday, that by Friday; take the weekend, perhaps, to walk around the block and forgive yourself.
But inside that timetable is a much larger, more interesting book. Dufresne is, above all, a storyteller, and he cannot help treating the writing life as material. The voice on the page is the voice of the good workshop teacher and the barroom raconteur fused together: he offers rules only to undercut them with anecdotes, underlines the necessity of hard work while confessing to his own glamorous procrastinations. He is clear that novels are made out of other novels – the reading list at the end of the book functions as a kind of genetic map – and he speaks to the reader as someone who already loves fiction enough to have been haunted, and perhaps a little undone, by it.
The early chapters are the book at its most hospitable. Dufresne begins, sensibly, not with plot diagrams but with language itself. Before you have characters, you have words. He pushes you to collect phrases, scraps of overheard talk, odd juxtapositions, the way a certain street corner smells in the rain. He is not precious about it. There is nothing here of the mystic at the typewriter waiting for the Muse; instead, there is the patient craftsperson, stocking the drawers of the workshop. Reading these pages, you feel your hands itching for a notebook.
From there he moves to the question of material: the thin ice between memoir and fiction, the temptation to simply transcribe your own history and call it a novel. Dufresne has little patience for self–indulgent confession; he is not telling you that your life is not interesting, only that life is not yet story. Again and again he reminds you that fiction is about desire and trouble. What does your character want, and what stands in the way? The autobiographical can be a great source of pressure, but it has to be shaped, reframed, sometimes lied about, to become art. He is gentle on this point and unsparing at once.
Perhaps the strongest sections of the book are those on character, and here his teaching is both playful and quietly ruthless. In “All the Lonely People” he turns you loose on your protagonist and every satellite character, asking questions that sound like party games and turn out to be diagnostic tools. What was the last lie this person told? What wound are they carrying that they do not talk about? What does their perfect day off look like? He sends them to funerals and birthday parties, puts them on buses and planes and in hotel lobbies, forces them to order dinner, pack a suitcase, read bad news in a newspaper. By the end of those exercises they may still refuse to behave on the page, but they are undeniably alive. If you take that section seriously, your cast will never again be a line–up of stick figures designed solely to serve the plot.
Plot itself gets a slightly more traditional treatment, but even here Dufresne is wary of templates. Yes, he draws Aristotle’s incline and sketches the familiar constellation of inciting incident, midpoint, crisis and climax. Yes, he reminds you that readers of mystery, romance or quest narratives arrive with certain structural expectations. But he is not selling a three–act kit. What he wants is for you to understand the shape of the story you are already, perhaps unconsciously, building. Are you writing a line, a circle, a braid, a frame? Does your novel move forward cleanly in chronological time, or is it forever slipping–or lurching–backward? He encourages you to literally draw the shape of your book: a spiral, a zigzag, a loop that brings your character home to a place made unrecognisable by what has happened.
The book’s core craft insight is that novels are made, almost atom by atom, of scenes. Entire chapters are devoted to what scenes are, where to put them, and how to know when you have written one instead of a page of throat–clearing. A scene, in Dufresne’s formulation, follows an active character through an emotionally charged event that leaves them changed, however slightly, by its end. The deceptively simple “Emergency Fiction” or scenic paradigm exercise – in which you give a character something they love, something they fear, another person to collide with and no easy escape – is the kind of thing that could, all by itself, rescue a stalled draft. He is very good on the difference between scene and summary, on why your novel cannot survive if all the truly important events happen offstage and are later reported over coffee.
On dialogue, he is both practical and a little severe. Real speech is full of filler, repetition, pleasantries, the odd conversational cul–de–sac. Fictional dialogue must seem real while containing only what matters. He is ruthless with “fancy” dialogue tags and adverb–stuffed attributions, urging you back toward the invisible “said” while insisting that the emotional colour of an exchange be carried by the words themselves and the physical behaviour around them. His exercises on people talking at cross–purposes, or revealing long–kept secrets in what looks like idle talk, are among the best in the book. Reading those pages, it is hard not to hear your own characters suddenly clearing their throats in the background, asking to be allowed more interesting things to say.
None of this would work as well if Dufresne were not, in essence, funny. The humour is rarely jokey; it is more a steady, observational wit, pointed at the absurdities of writing culture and at his own habits first. He is fond of second person admonitions – you will be tempted to tidy, to outline, to give up – but he salts them with enough self–mockery that they never feel like scolding. When he imagines a polite man with a gun standing behind your chair, murmuring encouragement while you draft, the image is macabre and somehow reassuring. Someone needs you to get this down; someone is taking your work seriously, even if that someone is a fictional hit man invented by your writing teacher.
The later chapters, on revision, are where the book earns the “craftsmanship” in its subtitle. Having shepherded you through a chaotic, exploratory first draft, Dufresne refuses to let you imagine that you are finished. He talks about cutting the first chapter entirely to see if the story actually starts later. He asks you to read the whole thing aloud, listening for where the music dies, where the syntax clanks. He has you circle adjectives and adverbs, strike the ones that can be replaced by a stronger noun or verb, and reconsider the “furniture” of the novel – its objects, habits, incidental characters – to see which of them are earning their keep. None of this is revolutionary; it is, in fact, exactly what serious writers have always done. What he offers is a way to think about it in stages, to break down what can feel overwhelming into passes: first for structure, then for sound, then for the level of the sentence.
There is also a rich, sometimes under–remarked thread about place running through the book. Dufresne cares deeply where fiction happens. In the early weeks he prods you to map not just geography but social space: where your characters shop, which diners stay open late, what the weather is like when the buses stop running. Later he returns to setting with the eye of a photographer, asking you to study paintings and photographs – the Hopper apartment, the anonymous faces in news photos – until you can feel the muffled sounds behind the glass. He is surprisingly insistent that you remember your novel is not a private chamber drama in the void but a slice of a particular world at a particular historical moment. Every novelist, he suggests, is a kind of accidental sociologist, reporting on how people live now, under these specific constraints. That reminder keeps leaking out of the exercises and into your own thinking; you begin to notice not only your character’s heartbreak but the price of rent, the buses that no longer run to their part of town, the slogans on the billboards they pretend not to read.
His pages on voice and style are briefer than some readers might like, but they are more honest than many longer treatments. Voice, he says in so many words, is what you arrive at after you have tried a lot of other people’s voices on and worn them out. He refuses to offer quick tricks for “finding your style”. Instead he urges you to attend to diction, syntax, rhythm, to read your work aloud and listen for when it sounds like anyone, and when it sounds like you. He is alert to the way tone emerges from attitude – toward the characters, toward the reader, toward the world – and he is unsentimental about the fact that some stories require a cooler distance while others demand a closer, more vulnerable intimacy. What he will not do, blessedly, is tell you that there is one correct tone for “serious” fiction. The book’s own blend of warmth, sarcasm and lyricism suggests that he believes in many possible stances, so long as they are chosen and sustained rather than defaulted into.
Readers of certain other guides may miss explicit discussions of market realities, of genre positioning, of how to tailor one’s work to current trends. Dufresne largely abstains from that part of the conversation. It is not that he is naïve about publishing – he has been in the business too long for that – but that he understands how paralysing such calculations can be at the level of the sentence. His emphasis, again and again, is on the desk in front of you: on the paragraph you can improve today, the scene you can deepen, the lie your character can finally tell. There are other books, and entire corners of the internet, that will tell you how to query, how to brand, how to maximise discoverability. “Is Life Like This?” is content to concern itself with sentences, scenes, chapters, and with the human beings who must be invented to move through them. Depending on your temperament, this will feel either like an omission or like a blessed relief.
Finally, there is the question of how best to use a book like this. The literal six–month programme will appeal to certain temperaments, particularly writers who like to check boxes and measure progress. Others may find it more useful as a non–linear kit: something to be opened at random when stuck, a sort of written workshop in a box. The structure accommodates both approaches better than it first appears. Each week’s theme – character, scene, dialogue, plot, revision – is self–contained enough that you can raid it out of sequence, yet there is a clear cumulative logic if you follow the plan. Rereading it while already deep in a draft, I found myself ignoring the calendar entirely and instead keeping a running list of exercises to try the next time a scene fell flat. In that sense the book becomes less a one–off boot camp than a long–term reference, its pages more dog–eared and ink–scarred with every pass.
What distinguishes “Is Life Like This?” from many of its shelf–mates is the breadth of its sympathies. Dufresne is as concerned with the novelist’s emotional weather as he is with plot points. He writes about shame and doubt, about the loneliness of long projects, about the way life’s crises both feed and derail the work. He reminds you that your novel is not your therapy and yet acknowledges that, of course, you are going to smuggle yourself into it. He goes out of his way to argue that the only durable motives for the work are love of story and love of the making itself. Fame, reviews, even publication are all too contingent to stake a life on. This might be the quietest, most radical part of the book: the insistence that writing is an end in itself, not merely a means to join a club.
As with any craft book that leans so heavily on voice, your tolerance for Dufresne’s particular manner will vary. If you find the extended metaphors and occasional flights of whimsy irritating, there is no neutral, stripped–down fallback tone for you to retreat into; this is a book with a personality. I found that personality, on the whole, to be bracing company. When he nudges you toward reading more widely, he does so as a fellow addict, not a schoolmaster. When he lists the writing guides and novels he had on his desk while composing his own, he is not building a pedestal but pointing toward the web of influence that underlies any honest book about how to write.
If you measure a craft book by the number of marginal notes it provokes, “Is Life Like This?” is a success. It does what good teachers do: breaks large mysteries into smaller, workable questions, insists on discipline while leaving room for discovery, and treats the reader as a writer already in motion. It will not, cannot, guarantee a finished novel in half a year; nothing can. But it can make that time feel structured rather than formless, and it can accompany you through the inevitable stretches of fear, boredom and delight without flinching or condescending. For that, I would rate it 86 out of 100, and I suspect I will still be pulling it off the shelf, for one exercise or another, long after this particular six–month calendar has ceased to matter.
On its surface, “Is Life Like This?” is a schedule. Dufresne divides the project of a first novel into 26 weeks, each with its own theme and a cluster of exercises. Week 1 asks you to collect words and sentences like a magpie. By Week 12 you are writing a one–page synopsis and taking the temperature of the pages you already have. By Weeks 21 to 24, he is shoving you toward a complete, messy first draft, insisting that a careful first draft is a failed one, that your job is to know less than you think you need to and keep going anyway. The architecture is reassuringly concrete: do this on Monday, that by Friday; take the weekend, perhaps, to walk around the block and forgive yourself.
But inside that timetable is a much larger, more interesting book. Dufresne is, above all, a storyteller, and he cannot help treating the writing life as material. The voice on the page is the voice of the good workshop teacher and the barroom raconteur fused together: he offers rules only to undercut them with anecdotes, underlines the necessity of hard work while confessing to his own glamorous procrastinations. He is clear that novels are made out of other novels – the reading list at the end of the book functions as a kind of genetic map – and he speaks to the reader as someone who already loves fiction enough to have been haunted, and perhaps a little undone, by it.
The early chapters are the book at its most hospitable. Dufresne begins, sensibly, not with plot diagrams but with language itself. Before you have characters, you have words. He pushes you to collect phrases, scraps of overheard talk, odd juxtapositions, the way a certain street corner smells in the rain. He is not precious about it. There is nothing here of the mystic at the typewriter waiting for the Muse; instead, there is the patient craftsperson, stocking the drawers of the workshop. Reading these pages, you feel your hands itching for a notebook.
From there he moves to the question of material: the thin ice between memoir and fiction, the temptation to simply transcribe your own history and call it a novel. Dufresne has little patience for self–indulgent confession; he is not telling you that your life is not interesting, only that life is not yet story. Again and again he reminds you that fiction is about desire and trouble. What does your character want, and what stands in the way? The autobiographical can be a great source of pressure, but it has to be shaped, reframed, sometimes lied about, to become art. He is gentle on this point and unsparing at once.
Perhaps the strongest sections of the book are those on character, and here his teaching is both playful and quietly ruthless. In “All the Lonely People” he turns you loose on your protagonist and every satellite character, asking questions that sound like party games and turn out to be diagnostic tools. What was the last lie this person told? What wound are they carrying that they do not talk about? What does their perfect day off look like? He sends them to funerals and birthday parties, puts them on buses and planes and in hotel lobbies, forces them to order dinner, pack a suitcase, read bad news in a newspaper. By the end of those exercises they may still refuse to behave on the page, but they are undeniably alive. If you take that section seriously, your cast will never again be a line–up of stick figures designed solely to serve the plot.
Plot itself gets a slightly more traditional treatment, but even here Dufresne is wary of templates. Yes, he draws Aristotle’s incline and sketches the familiar constellation of inciting incident, midpoint, crisis and climax. Yes, he reminds you that readers of mystery, romance or quest narratives arrive with certain structural expectations. But he is not selling a three–act kit. What he wants is for you to understand the shape of the story you are already, perhaps unconsciously, building. Are you writing a line, a circle, a braid, a frame? Does your novel move forward cleanly in chronological time, or is it forever slipping–or lurching–backward? He encourages you to literally draw the shape of your book: a spiral, a zigzag, a loop that brings your character home to a place made unrecognisable by what has happened.
The book’s core craft insight is that novels are made, almost atom by atom, of scenes. Entire chapters are devoted to what scenes are, where to put them, and how to know when you have written one instead of a page of throat–clearing. A scene, in Dufresne’s formulation, follows an active character through an emotionally charged event that leaves them changed, however slightly, by its end. The deceptively simple “Emergency Fiction” or scenic paradigm exercise – in which you give a character something they love, something they fear, another person to collide with and no easy escape – is the kind of thing that could, all by itself, rescue a stalled draft. He is very good on the difference between scene and summary, on why your novel cannot survive if all the truly important events happen offstage and are later reported over coffee.
On dialogue, he is both practical and a little severe. Real speech is full of filler, repetition, pleasantries, the odd conversational cul–de–sac. Fictional dialogue must seem real while containing only what matters. He is ruthless with “fancy” dialogue tags and adverb–stuffed attributions, urging you back toward the invisible “said” while insisting that the emotional colour of an exchange be carried by the words themselves and the physical behaviour around them. His exercises on people talking at cross–purposes, or revealing long–kept secrets in what looks like idle talk, are among the best in the book. Reading those pages, it is hard not to hear your own characters suddenly clearing their throats in the background, asking to be allowed more interesting things to say.
None of this would work as well if Dufresne were not, in essence, funny. The humour is rarely jokey; it is more a steady, observational wit, pointed at the absurdities of writing culture and at his own habits first. He is fond of second person admonitions – you will be tempted to tidy, to outline, to give up – but he salts them with enough self–mockery that they never feel like scolding. When he imagines a polite man with a gun standing behind your chair, murmuring encouragement while you draft, the image is macabre and somehow reassuring. Someone needs you to get this down; someone is taking your work seriously, even if that someone is a fictional hit man invented by your writing teacher.
The later chapters, on revision, are where the book earns the “craftsmanship” in its subtitle. Having shepherded you through a chaotic, exploratory first draft, Dufresne refuses to let you imagine that you are finished. He talks about cutting the first chapter entirely to see if the story actually starts later. He asks you to read the whole thing aloud, listening for where the music dies, where the syntax clanks. He has you circle adjectives and adverbs, strike the ones that can be replaced by a stronger noun or verb, and reconsider the “furniture” of the novel – its objects, habits, incidental characters – to see which of them are earning their keep. None of this is revolutionary; it is, in fact, exactly what serious writers have always done. What he offers is a way to think about it in stages, to break down what can feel overwhelming into passes: first for structure, then for sound, then for the level of the sentence.
There is also a rich, sometimes under–remarked thread about place running through the book. Dufresne cares deeply where fiction happens. In the early weeks he prods you to map not just geography but social space: where your characters shop, which diners stay open late, what the weather is like when the buses stop running. Later he returns to setting with the eye of a photographer, asking you to study paintings and photographs – the Hopper apartment, the anonymous faces in news photos – until you can feel the muffled sounds behind the glass. He is surprisingly insistent that you remember your novel is not a private chamber drama in the void but a slice of a particular world at a particular historical moment. Every novelist, he suggests, is a kind of accidental sociologist, reporting on how people live now, under these specific constraints. That reminder keeps leaking out of the exercises and into your own thinking; you begin to notice not only your character’s heartbreak but the price of rent, the buses that no longer run to their part of town, the slogans on the billboards they pretend not to read.
His pages on voice and style are briefer than some readers might like, but they are more honest than many longer treatments. Voice, he says in so many words, is what you arrive at after you have tried a lot of other people’s voices on and worn them out. He refuses to offer quick tricks for “finding your style”. Instead he urges you to attend to diction, syntax, rhythm, to read your work aloud and listen for when it sounds like anyone, and when it sounds like you. He is alert to the way tone emerges from attitude – toward the characters, toward the reader, toward the world – and he is unsentimental about the fact that some stories require a cooler distance while others demand a closer, more vulnerable intimacy. What he will not do, blessedly, is tell you that there is one correct tone for “serious” fiction. The book’s own blend of warmth, sarcasm and lyricism suggests that he believes in many possible stances, so long as they are chosen and sustained rather than defaulted into.
Readers of certain other guides may miss explicit discussions of market realities, of genre positioning, of how to tailor one’s work to current trends. Dufresne largely abstains from that part of the conversation. It is not that he is naïve about publishing – he has been in the business too long for that – but that he understands how paralysing such calculations can be at the level of the sentence. His emphasis, again and again, is on the desk in front of you: on the paragraph you can improve today, the scene you can deepen, the lie your character can finally tell. There are other books, and entire corners of the internet, that will tell you how to query, how to brand, how to maximise discoverability. “Is Life Like This?” is content to concern itself with sentences, scenes, chapters, and with the human beings who must be invented to move through them. Depending on your temperament, this will feel either like an omission or like a blessed relief.
Finally, there is the question of how best to use a book like this. The literal six–month programme will appeal to certain temperaments, particularly writers who like to check boxes and measure progress. Others may find it more useful as a non–linear kit: something to be opened at random when stuck, a sort of written workshop in a box. The structure accommodates both approaches better than it first appears. Each week’s theme – character, scene, dialogue, plot, revision – is self–contained enough that you can raid it out of sequence, yet there is a clear cumulative logic if you follow the plan. Rereading it while already deep in a draft, I found myself ignoring the calendar entirely and instead keeping a running list of exercises to try the next time a scene fell flat. In that sense the book becomes less a one–off boot camp than a long–term reference, its pages more dog–eared and ink–scarred with every pass.
What distinguishes “Is Life Like This?” from many of its shelf–mates is the breadth of its sympathies. Dufresne is as concerned with the novelist’s emotional weather as he is with plot points. He writes about shame and doubt, about the loneliness of long projects, about the way life’s crises both feed and derail the work. He reminds you that your novel is not your therapy and yet acknowledges that, of course, you are going to smuggle yourself into it. He goes out of his way to argue that the only durable motives for the work are love of story and love of the making itself. Fame, reviews, even publication are all too contingent to stake a life on. This might be the quietest, most radical part of the book: the insistence that writing is an end in itself, not merely a means to join a club.
As with any craft book that leans so heavily on voice, your tolerance for Dufresne’s particular manner will vary. If you find the extended metaphors and occasional flights of whimsy irritating, there is no neutral, stripped–down fallback tone for you to retreat into; this is a book with a personality. I found that personality, on the whole, to be bracing company. When he nudges you toward reading more widely, he does so as a fellow addict, not a schoolmaster. When he lists the writing guides and novels he had on his desk while composing his own, he is not building a pedestal but pointing toward the web of influence that underlies any honest book about how to write.
If you measure a craft book by the number of marginal notes it provokes, “Is Life Like This?” is a success. It does what good teachers do: breaks large mysteries into smaller, workable questions, insists on discipline while leaving room for discovery, and treats the reader as a writer already in motion. It will not, cannot, guarantee a finished novel in half a year; nothing can. But it can make that time feel structured rather than formless, and it can accompany you through the inevitable stretches of fear, boredom and delight without flinching or condescending. For that, I would rate it 86 out of 100, and I suspect I will still be pulling it off the shelf, for one exercise or another, long after this particular six–month calendar has ceased to matter.
January 31, 2017
The book was fine, I suppose. But reading through it quickly, I don't believe I gleaned anything particularly new or useful. This isn't Dufresne's fault, however. I think it's more a sign that I've read too much about writing and just need to sit my ass down in the chair and start working.
This has been a week of transition and life changes. My mother is dying even as I write this, and her passing is making me consider my own mortality and future. I will hate myself if in the years I have left I don't write at least one novel I'm proud of, and I have put it off entirely too long already. As a result, I'm stepping away from coaching debate (and possibly also from teaching altogether) to work on writing.
It's been 17 years since I published anything, and switching from non-fiction to fiction, I am literally beginning from scratch. (I'm not even sure my agent remembers me or will agree to represent me again.) But it's time. Professionally, the happiest time in my life was when I was writing my two books. My personal life was a mess, but the act of writing made me truly happy.
This has been a week of transition and life changes. My mother is dying even as I write this, and her passing is making me consider my own mortality and future. I will hate myself if in the years I have left I don't write at least one novel I'm proud of, and I have put it off entirely too long already. As a result, I'm stepping away from coaching debate (and possibly also from teaching altogether) to work on writing.
It's been 17 years since I published anything, and switching from non-fiction to fiction, I am literally beginning from scratch. (I'm not even sure my agent remembers me or will agree to represent me again.) But it's time. Professionally, the happiest time in my life was when I was writing my two books. My personal life was a mess, but the act of writing made me truly happy.
January 28, 2013
Great book, especially if you're writing your first novel. Dufresne's THE LIE THAT TELLS THE TRUTH is probably the better all-around book on writing fiction, as good as any work by a single author, particularly if you agree that writing prompts are an important part of the life.
The title is a misnomer. You won't be finished with your novel in six months. You will have a draft. This points to one of the strengths of Dufresne's teaching: He gives boundaries to what is too often a formless activity. How many writers flounder without goals or concrete directives? Through the many writing prompts an author is guided in such a way that greatly curtails the propensity to sit before blank page with too many possibilities. Try it for six months and then if you like go back to whatever you like.
The title is a misnomer. You won't be finished with your novel in six months. You will have a draft. This points to one of the strengths of Dufresne's teaching: He gives boundaries to what is too often a formless activity. How many writers flounder without goals or concrete directives? Through the many writing prompts an author is guided in such a way that greatly curtails the propensity to sit before blank page with too many possibilities. Try it for six months and then if you like go back to whatever you like.
November 3, 2023
Really liked this one!! Had a lot of excercises and writing tasks to flesh out the world and characters of the novel you're thinking about writing. There was a lot of crossover with his other book a lie that tells a truth but there was also new stuff too. I really love the last section centered around reviewing what you've written and reflecting on what you want to keep and what you want to rework. Recommend for anybody who's having trouble pinning down their ideas.
April 22, 2013
When I was in screenwriting classes in college, I had a professor who warned us about writing books that were written by people who aren't writers. They just teach OTHER people how to do the thing they don't do. Now, This author IS an actual author with real published work, which is what persuaded me to buy this book, but I STILL didn't finish it out if frustration. Often, writing books fall flat because the author is too vague but this author has the opposite. It's way to convoluted. I have a feeling you'd end up with a lot of notes and no real novel by the end of it. If you struggle with ideas and formulating plans that might not be such a bad thing but if that's not your objective (and it's not the objective stated on the cover or back copy) then it's better not to waste time or energy here.
I think the best thing about this book is the quotes from other authors, they illuminate what ever message he's trying to send but there are other books of author quotes. I suggest you try one of them and skip the middle man. Also, don't give into any book that claims to help you write a novel in 6 months or a year or any given time period because novels are a LOT of work that can't be squished into a certain time period if you want it to be any good (if you don't then, well, by all means...)
I think the best thing about this book is the quotes from other authors, they illuminate what ever message he's trying to send but there are other books of author quotes. I suggest you try one of them and skip the middle man. Also, don't give into any book that claims to help you write a novel in 6 months or a year or any given time period because novels are a LOT of work that can't be squished into a certain time period if you want it to be any good (if you don't then, well, by all means...)
July 1, 2011
I have been taking notes from this book, collecting recommended texts, and engaging in some of the writing exercises. I like his hands-on, step-by-step approach to writing. The writing I have done so far is mostly vignettes based on the suggested exercises. I also have collected some of the resources he's recommended (a new Bartlett's Roget's Thesaurus, for example) and reading some of my favorite books, but reading them as a writer, with an eye for the writer's craft. My initial notes from this book (which I keep checking out from my public library) are dated 6/10 -- I've been at this, off and on, for a while now!
September 18, 2012
This book offered some classic tips and pointers on writing while bringing each to life with in-text examples. It's a quick "how-to," a little different than others I've read, but I gave it four stars for not having any sort of synopsis. When reading a book on writing, I like to see some sort of list with highlights on what I should have learned--something I can keep next to me as I'm finishing my work. It's difficult to read a "how-to" guide, close the pages at the end, and then try to remember every tip and key idea the author gave.
All in all, if you enjoy reading about writing, you'll love this book.
All in all, if you enjoy reading about writing, you'll love this book.
January 30, 2013
I have an unfair advantage in that I know John Dufresne. I can tell I'd love to take a class with him, now, because I enjoyed this book - I found it engaging, intelligent and non-threatening. It really sounds like him, right down to the asides that turn into footnotes. It's not a book for everyone, but it's great for a wanna-be novelist that's looking for some moral support and structure as they actually move into the process of writing that first novel.
Want to read
January 20, 2010i read an article in a writing magazine by Dufresne who described writing a novel to be like driving through a fog where you can only see a foot ahead of you headlights; it's impossible to make out what's in front of you but you can make it the whole trip that way
April 22, 2013
This book starts out very strong, with good advice on the first page.
I am still reading it, so more to follow.
I am still reading it, so more to follow.
July 13, 2012
Great for aspiring writers and novelists. An excellent read but I am very biased, having taken a couple of his writing clinics in the recent past.
September 10, 2020
An excellent read for an aspiring author. Full of practical advice that leaves the reader feeling well equipped to begin writing their first draft.
March 17, 2010
for non-fiction writers who need more than a jumpstart. ickily similar to "writing down the bones"
July 3, 2010
I really enjoyed this book.
September 7, 2015
An excellent guide for helping you work out character development, plot outlines, etc.
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