The Weekend Novelist Writes A Mystery

In Seattle, Jack Remick and Robert Ray have been developing and teaching these approaches and exercises to understanding plot and character for years. As a professional writer and teacher of writing and I have been waiting for them to be published so that I could use them with my own students without blatantly stealing them. Their approaches to writing fiction are unique in the country, as far as I know. Take the question, what is the resource base and who controls it? The answer affects everything from how one character greets another to why one character kills another. Remick and Ray take you through a step-by-step process of exploring character and building plot using Natalie Goldberg's writing practice techniques as well as brilliant strategies for building an underlying structure. This is not superficial, contrived stuff, it is about getting down to archetypal events like threshhold crossiings and down to archetypal characters like mythic helpers. I was a fiction reader for a literary magazine for five years and I wish I could send every aspiring fiction writer in the country the sections on writing dialogue. Remick and Ray use models of mysteries from The Big Sleep to Gorky Park to a mystery they've written themselves within this book to illustrate every point and strategy. They guide you through writing a mystery novel in 52 weekends, but I recommend it for writers writing nonmystery novels, too, and short stories too.