How to Write a Novel in Ten Days

WMG Writer's Guides Book 6

By: Dean Wesley Smith

Narrated by: Phil Baker

Length: 1 hr and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

Even in today's fast-paced world, the myth that writing fast equals writing badly - or, conversely, writing well equals writing slowly - persists. Now, USA Today best-selling author Dean Wesley Smith aims to shatter this myth once and for all with this latest WMG Writer's Guide.

In a series of blog posts, Smith chronicled his process toward ghost writing a 70,000-word novel for a traditional publisher in just 10 days. He wrote about his progress, his feelings about the writing, and how he approached and overcame obstacles. This audiobook takes readers on a journey that demonstrates that writing fast, and writing well, comes from motivation and practice.

USA Today best-selling author Dean Wesley Smith published more than a hundred novels in 30 years and hundreds and hundreds of short stories across many genres. He wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, they wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies. He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of a dozen films, from The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown. He now writes his own original fiction under just the one name, Dean Wesley Smith. In addition to his upcoming novel releases, his monthly magazine called Smith's Monthly premiered October 1, 2013, filled entirely with his original novels and stories. Dean also worked as an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He now plays a role as an executive editor for the original anthology series Fiction River.

©2014 Dean Wesley Smith (P)2014 Dean Wesley Smith

Good for what it is

DWS is an inspiration. I just wish this had been more prepared for audio. The blog posts state that the best info is found in the answers to questions in the comments.

This is more what writing fast looks like in practice than it is instructional. Still glad I listened.

A good peek inside

I really enjoy hearing from dean His words are straight to the point and inspiring. I love how he breaks through barriers.

Waste of time

A waste of the 20 minutes it took to skip through 12 repetitive chapters of nothing except a glorified daily word count. Do not buy or use credits. Thanks

Mildly interesting, but not very informative

When I bought this book, I was under the impression, from the title, that this book would offer tips, or guidance, or similar, on how to get a novel done in a short time. In reality, this author--who appears to be a very proficient and proliferate author--mostly just tells us how many thousands of words he's done each day, and how he also manages to get other daily stuff done, then tallies up his words after 10 or 11 days, and says, "See? I did it. Now you know it can be done."

The author is a proud "pantser," which means that he writes his novels "by the seat of his pants," or rather, without designing the novel ahead of time. I understand that he was ghost-writing a novel while he did the blog posts about it which he used for material for this book, and that he was contractually obligated not to tell us whose book he was writing, but he almost shared nothing about his process, whatsoever. Maybe he doesn't actually *know* his process, since he is a pantser. It is possible that he has just built his writing process out of certain patterns that work for him, and he just automatically falls into them when he novelizes. I find it unlikely that this is the case, since he apparently teaches writing courses and workshops when he is not writing. I was a bit disappointed with this, however, and I wish he'd added more useful info.

It was a little interesting, and I won't say that having someone demonstrate his example wasn't at least a little inspiring, but his lessons, or tips, or whatever, can be summed up by the following:

- Stay at it, and you can do this, too.
- Treat it like a fun hobby that you make money at, and trust yourself to write well.

He kept mentioning the comments on his blog posts, and how important it would be to read them, but they were not included in this book, so ended up being irrelevant. I wish they'd been included, as that would have added more in the way of useful information, I'm sure.

Ironically, the excerpt from another book on writing that he wrote, at the end of the book, gave me more useful information than the entirety of the book I had just finished listening to. I'm probably going to buy that book, even though this one was barely worth the $2 I paid for it.

The narrator, on the other hand, was AWESOME, and had just the right tone throughout this work.