★★★★★ : Is Life Like This?: A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months (Hardcover) by John Dufresne, reviewed by C. J. Singh on amazon.com, copy posted January 22, 2010 (55 of 58 people found the review helpful.) – See all my reviews

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In the main, John Dufresne’s new book, aptly subtitled “A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months,” comprises novel-focused insights of his earlier book, The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction (2005). That book was highly praised for Dufresne’s amiable voice and wit. The new book sustains both very well and is complete in itself –without a prerequisite reading of his previous craft book. Dufresne, a professor in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at Florida International University, is the author of several acclaimed literary novels and includes brief examples from these published works. The book sequences the twenty chapters by weeks in the suggested twenty-six week writing schedule.

The opening four chapters cover the first four weeks, assigned to finding the subject and the principal characters of your story. Here’s an example of his lucid expository writing: “I usually begin my novels with a character, someone who intrigues me for some reason or other…. I find a person, and then I give that person some trouble, and then I ask that person what she wants to do about the trouble, and then put more obstacles in her way — writing a novel is taking the path of most resistance” (pp 71-72).

The fifth chapter introduces plotting. Dufresne cites the widely used screen-writing plot diagram: “We might borrow a technique from screenwriting and establish four important scenic moments and use them as a scaffold for building our plot: the opening scene; the plot point at the end of Act I; the plot point at the end of Act II; and the end of the novel” (p 111). Plot point is explained as “a twist that sends the novel off in a new direction.” (The screen-writing plot diagram was first adapted from Aristotle’s Poetics by Syd Field in his pioneering books, Screenplay, published in 1978, and The Screenwriter’s Workbook ).