The Weekend Novelist Redrafts the Novel: A Step by Step Guide to Perfecting Your Work [Paperback]

THE WEEKEND NOVELIST REDRAFTS THE NOVEL makes an excellent companion to Ray's "The Weekend Novelist" (TWN). But what if you haven't read TWN? Can you still use the follow-up book? You could -- thanks to its 11-page detailed glossary. The book also includes a witty rewrite-in-progress of a draft -- a draft that was evidently completed without its author having read TWN.

In redrafting, Ray focuses on restructuring, not mere copyediting: "The key to rewriting your novel is not line-editing, the key is fixing the subplots. If you fix the subplots, then the manuscript will shape up" (page 7). The assumption here is that the writer has already structured the main plot with care. Ray suggests many restructuring exercises such as making separate grids for each subplot. Throughout, he presents structural analyses of a number of novels to illustrate craft concepts. The novels include:
literary contemporaries such asThe Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler,
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys,and
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje;
literary classics like "Pride and Prejudice," "Jane Eyre," and "The Great Gatsby";
and a few genre novels like "Gorky Park" and "The Eye of the Needle."

Ray also comments on the screen adaptations of many of the above novels and suggests the "Rewrite mantra: to find story secrets, study good films" (p. 35). In both editions of TWN, the short list of recommended books for novel-writing include Syd Field's pioneering "The Screenwriter's Workbook," which popularized the three-act structure (derived from Aristotle's "Poetics") and two major plot points. The second edition begins by noting: "Writing a novel in the twenty-first century is made complicated by the world of screens. It wasn't like that always....Screens have changed the writing world. When the writing world changes, the writer must change." To learn the new complications in the craft, I studied both editions of TWN.

In TWN first edition, Ray lucidly analyzes the fiction craft in one novel, Anne Tyler's "The Accidental Tourist," a great favorite of mine ("Anne Tyler is not merely good; she is wickedly good," wrote John Updike). Study of this edition effectivley teaches many characterization techniques. TWN, second edition, expands "the plotting section ...to give you a range of choices for building your book. The basic concept you need to build a plot is architecture" (ix). It presents detailed craft analyses of five contemporary novels including two with cyclical structural design. The five novels are:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon;
Amsterdam: A Novel by Ian McEwan;
White Teeth: A Novel by Zadie Smith;
and the two with cyclical design,
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho;
The Namesake: A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri (film adaptation,The Namesake DVD).

Yes, the second edition does teach more complex plot-structures; however, many might find the straight-forward treatment of plot in the first edition more than adequate.

The redrafting guide schedules 20 hours each weekend for 17 weeks for rewriting -- at least as many hours as scheduled in TWN for completing the initial draft. I found no particular merit in long sessions on weekends and reverted to the equivalent schedule of daily three-hour sessions.

Although "The Weekend Novelist Redrafts the Novel" could serve as a guide by itself, it'll clearly be more effective as a follow-up to the first or second edition of "The Weekend Novelist."

--C J Singh