Your book needs a good description. In fact, it needs several. In this article you’ll learn about the purpose and construction of a scene list, a long synopsis, a short synopsis, a pitch, a tagline, and a formula compare. When you’re done, you’ll be ready to describe your story to anybody, under any condition.
As I read McCarthy’s The Road, I just had to drop my jaw at how the man uses words. McCarthy is a master of vivid detail and excellent characterization in a minimalist style. Talk about stripping your prose — McCarthy even does away with quotation marks and apostrophes, which I’m sure has all you purists out there howling with indignation. (I whimpered a bit at first, myself.) Still–if you’re looking for fiction trimmed of all fat and frills, I doubt you’ll find a leaner example than McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalypse.
I’ve said before that one of the biggest challenges of blogging is writing to a regular deadline. It wears you down. You want to know the answer? The trick? If you’ve read my updates on the Challenge, you already know. For that matter, if you just read the section headings for this article, you know. The answer is to take control. Take control of your blog posting schedule, instead of drifting helplessly into your deadlines, and your blog will blossom and grow again, both in quality of content and in your affection as well.
This week, I want you to develop an excellent example of an extended metaphor. You’ll have to deal with all the problems I mentioned in last week’s article, but it gets harder because you’ll have to deal with them again and again, every time you go back to that well. You can do it, though. The whole trick is to spend some serious time thinking about your metaphor before you start, pick one that really works, and only talk about the aspects of it that do work.
All this talk of document structure has me thinking back on some of my older projects. As I said in yesterday’s article, the series I’m working on now is highly structured — every book packed with three acts, five chapters per act, two scenes per chapter.
My older work isn’t really like that, though. My first effort at including any sort of structure in a story was King Jason’s War, and that was my fourth novel. I wonder what I’d find if I looked really closely at Taming Fire, or even The Poet Alexander….
In that thought, I found my answer. The Ghost Targets series isn’t formula, it’s structured. Structure is a good thing. I still needed some comforting, though, so I found myself chasing down that path, thinking of all the creative document types that thrive under intensive structure. I said to myself, “What about haiku? What about sonnets?”
