The Hero Books

The ‘Hero Book’ is a key success factor for our method.

Choose one of these books and place it next to your bed when you begin writing your novel.

You will need ONE book for the writing journey, just one, because you are going to be in an intimate and monogamous relationship with this book during the writing of your first draft of your novel with us. Yes, you may have afternoon trysts with other books, and flirtations, but you will need to be faithful to one book during the writing of your novel. Every night, please. Even if just for ten minutes before bedtime. Put that perfect prose and the big story shape inside your mind and sleep on it. Between that and the morning writing routine, you’ll become a novel-writing machine. This faithfulness mirrors the devotion you will show to your novel and helps you focus and avoid being distracted by temptations. 

Be careful about other books you choose to read during your writing period for the first draft of your novel or memoir. You might lose sight of your own theme and lose the ability to hear your own voice. Worse, you will start to worry your work isn’t as good as Tom, Dick and Kafka’s and you will get miserable.

You’ll read your Hero Book once for pure pleasure, to absorb the storyline. (Story, story, story.) When you’re reading it for the second or third time, you’ll be deep inside your own story, and will turn to it for assistance with technical problems. Your close study and profound understanding of how a great book works is part of our process; to give you craft skills to last a lifetime.

This is not an unusual method for a working novelist, in fact, it’s quite common. Norman Mailer, writing The Naked and the Dead, read and re-read Anna Karenina for inspiration.

We have chosen these books very carefully, as they are unarguably successful novels (sales and awards and acclaim) and have simple and elegant structures to teach you how to construct your own novel. They will give you safe steering. We ask you please to choose one of these as we know they work. As you are taking the course, please do take the course with everything we know will help you complete a novel to a very high standard. (You can discuss further with your writing coach.)

Choosing Your Hero Book.

We have listed beneath each Hero Book the genres most commonly attributed to them to guide your choice, but don’t fret the genre too much. Make a long list of those which appeal most to you. You need to choose a book you can love, respect and honor.

If you look at them on Amazon, you can peep inside the first chapters and make a shortlist. Choose the one you simply can’t wait to read more of. Your trust and affection for the Hero Book is the most important factor in making your choice.

Simply click on the picture of the book below to view it on 🇺🇸  Amazon.com.

(For those of you in the United Kingdom, please see this page here for links to Amazon.co.uk. 🇬🇧)