Making Deadlines

Check out Uber-Late Manuscripts to see what happens when an author doesn’t finish the book on time.  Yikes!  It ripples out to a lot of places and ultimately affects sales.   I’ve seen writers who want to get a book published, but don’t give it any kind of priority.  I have a relative who wants to write a Clancy-style thriller, but it’s never gotten very far because he hasn’t made writing it very important.

I’ve been trying to find ways to make the process simpler, so I can get from beginning to end faster.  I wrote my first draft of MAGIC STUD in 30 days, but I’ve spent almost two years revising it, and I need to do better.  Right now, I’m finishing up an outline workshop, and I’m trying the first step on my idea for the next project, SAND DOLLAR MAGIC.  It’s to write a synopsis of the book, with the beginning, middle, and end.

This is a lot different than I would normally do.  For MAGIC STUD, I wrote the query letter sumary (since changed), nailing down the what makes it special aspect, which I also did for SAND DOLLAR MAGIC.  Then, with only that, I wrote the first draft, not sure who the bad guy was or what the ending was.  At least other than “fight on an island.”

For SAND DOLLAR MAGIC, the hardest part of the synopsis has been identifying the ending.  Not just “fight on Black Hill” but showing how the story is resolved.  In anything I’ve written, the ending has always beeen sort of vague–even the short stories started out that way, and I would botch the ending and have to revise.  So I’m hoping to streamline that process by nailing it down up front and doing less revision in the writing stage.

The Synopsis

As I get close to the finish line, I’m starting to think about writing the synopsis.  A lot of writers dread them because they can be difficult to write.  One of the techniques I plan to use involves a spreadsheet.  First, I list all the chapter numbers.  Then I identify the story-related thing that happens in the chapter and summarize it in a few sentences next to the corresponding chapter number.

Once I go to the writing of the synopsis, I’ll start merging them together, refining the words, and shortening it.

I’m considering using this with a first draft, too, to help me keep track of the chapters.  I think hunting for deleted scenes in the backups is still going to be messy.

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Wordage report:  1,000 words (4 pages) for MAGIC STUD.

How Many Characters in the First Chapter?

When I was working on my co-written book Valley of Bones (no relation to the book with the same title), we opened with an action chapter that had eleven named characters in it.  The comments we got back were along the lines of “We need a scorecard.”  Way too many characters, and ways too many characters being introduced in the middle of an action scene, which made it even harder to keep track.

So I’m trying to figure out how many I should have when I run across A Writer’s Guide to Fiction at the bookstore.  Opened it, and there was the answer.  It said to keep the named characters to three or less.  After I thought about it a bit, it made sense to me.  I know who all the characters are because I wrote the book; the reader is coming it into cold, and the names don’t mean anything to him.  But it was hard because the book project had four main characters, so it required us to rethink how to open the story to introduce some of the characters but not all of them.

We also ended up applying it to the query and the synopsis (five and seven characters respectively) for the same reasons.