Amy Gentry's Blog - Posts Tagged "craft-books"

2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This just shot past Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel and Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence to the top of my list of craft book recommendations for novelists. It is not as punitive, aggressive, or gimmicky as its cover suggests, but is in fact a surprisingly joyful and holistic take on writing as well as a practical one. The author's goal was to jack up her word count, and in this short, conversational book, she explains how she attained that goal. But in doing so, she comes up with a system that reflects many truths I've observed in my writing but rarely seen discussed elsewhere.

Aaron's simplest and most radical idea is that you should enjoy writing every scene. If you do, you'll just naturally pick up speed, and the writing will improve significantly. If you're not, that's a flag for a problem. You should stop and solve the problem in your notes before you start writing again. THAT'S IT. There are tips for outlining, plotting in advance, and editing what you've written, but at its core, this is a book about loving to write and writing what you love.

I've written and published three novels, and have noticed (with some despair) that the parts I "binge-wrote" in 10K-12K binges are always my favorite scenes in the finished book. They just sing. The parts that felt like a slog when I was writing them required more editing afterward--like, tearing-your-hair-out editing--and the finished product, no matter how polished, doesn't sing.

There's a lot of woo-woo advice out there for how to get to that singing place, and some of it has worked for me. But Aaron's direct, pragmatic approach claims to work faster, offering a practical solution to writer's block that is neither "tough it out" nor "go chase butterflies and meditate." This is the holy grail of novel-writing books that manage to demystify the process without dumbing it down.



View all my reviews