Creative Writing Exercise

Last week, in my article about writing a good synopsis for your story, I talked about my Technical Writing semester project that involved sixteen full weeks of research and documentation concerning the target market for my first novel. That’s a little bit overboard.

Still, I talked yesterday about the incredible benefits of writing directly to an ideal reader, and I’ve talked again and again about the importance of audience analysis for a writer. When it comes right down to it, your story — no matter how good it is — has to have a market if it’s going to thrive.

The good news is that it probably does have a market. There’s an awful lot of readers out there — more now than ever — and with the impending collapse of the New York Publishing Houses as gatekeepers, people are getting better and better at finding the books that appeal to their individual tastes. The bad news is that, unless you’ve written a very genre piece in a genre you know really well, or actively worked to target a particular market, you probably haven’t completely written your story to please the market that’s craving it.

Weird, I know. It’s a problem I’m facing with the Ghost Targets series, and several of the writers I coach are going to run into it sooner or later. They’ve all written really neat stories with either vague categorization, or in a category they don’t really read. That’s exciting — it’s always good to stretch outside your comfort zones — but it’s also extra work. To make a story grow into anything other than a draft manuscript, you’ve got to shape it to its audience.

So that’s your job this week. Talk to me about your work-in-progress (I know you want to), but tell me specifically about the kind of readers who are going to love it. Tell me which buttons it pushes, which old themes it borrows heavily, which popular books it resembles, and how it compares against them. If you don’t know the answers to all those questions, look them up. If you can’t come up with sufficient answers, even after you research the markets you think it matches, maybe you’ve got another rewrite in store.

Don’t despair. That’s a good thing. It’s easy to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite out of perfectionism, or just nervous energy, hoping someday it will be “good enough.” That’s exhausting. Rewriting to achieve a specific, measurable purpose (with a clear and well-researched plan) is a much more rewarding process. Your ideal reader will thank you for it.

Photo credit Julie V. Photography.

My fantasy world, in all its glory.

I’ve talked a lot about the Technical Writing class I taught last fall, but I’ve rarely said a word about the time I took that class, eight years back. One of the coolest parts of that class (both times) was the big bad Semester Project. Every student has to pick a topic early in the semester, prepare a proposal and a couple progress reports, defend the proposal before the professor, develop a major documentation product, and finally give a report to the class at the end of the semester.

When I went through that course, I was waist-deep in my second big rewrite of my second novel, and gearing up for my first serious bid for publication. So for my documentation product, I put together a formal market analysis and submission package for my novel. I spent the whole semester researching agents and editors, practicing query letters and refining my plot synopsis. It was one of the most useful projects I did in my entire college career. I enjoyed every moment of it, right up until the end.

At the end, as I said, I had to do a presentation. Public speaking has never been my strong suit, but I kept telling myself, “On this topic, I’m an expert. I’m the expert. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Then the time came for my presentation, and I stepped up to the front of the class — a class filled almost entirely with Engineering and Business Majors.

I put up my first slide — a badass drawing of a growling dragon that I hoped to use as cover art — and all it got was a blank stare. I said, “For my project, I prepared a promotional packet for my fantasy novel, Taming Fire. It’s the story of an orphan boy who just wants to join the army, but ends up riding dragons and battling with some of the world’s most powerful wizards….”

This was before Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings movies brought fantasy mainstream. It was before Napoleon Dynamite shone a bright light on the miserable life of the truly excellent nerd. I met the eyes of everyone in the audience, as I’d been trained to do, and I saw bafflement and confusion. Somebody snickered. In that moment, I felt like such a little dork, talking to these engineers and businesspeople about my private fairytale. I had two more minutes of synopsis to give, though, before I was supposed to transition to the actual project — my research, the documents I’d written, and what I’d learned. Two minutes of dragons and dwarves and elves and magic.

Those were probably the longest, most painful two minutes of my life so far. It was brutal.

Story Summaries

There’s an easy lesson to be made here about audience analysis, but I want to talk more specifically about story descriptions. The saddest part of that story is that I’d spent the whole semester studying synopses, refining my story description, reworking it in new formats, but even after all that work, it was my story description that brought me down.

I could have come up with a description of the project that wouldn’t have left me feeling so stupid in that crowd. I didn’t, because I’d spent so long thinking about and writing to agents deeply entrenched in the fantasy genre. That’s where the audience analysis comes in. It also points to another need most new writers overlook: your book needs a good description. In fact, it needs several.

Why? Because people are going to ask. Even if it’s not for a class presentation, at some point someone’s going to ask you to describe what your book is about. That can — and should — be a magical moment. That’s an audience interested in this things you’ve been working so hard on. If you’re not prepared, though, it can be almost as awkward as my presentation was.

So start with that. Arm yourself up against the circumstance. Figure out exactly how you would describe your book to someone who’s not in your target market. Write it down. Aim for two or three pages, but if it’s shorter than that (or longer), that’s fine. Whatever it is, though, make sure it accurately describes your project, and that it does so in a way you would be comfortable sharing with a stranger.

When you’ve done that, you’ve done the hard work. You’ve captured, in a handful of pages, what your story is. You’re not relying on genre lingo or artificially easy comparisons to do the heavy lifting. You do still have some work to do, because (when it comes right down to it) that synopsis is the least useful one you’ll ever write.

It’s a fantastic starting point, though.

The Many Types of Plot Synopsis

The other types of book description all exist for very specific purposes. They include (and these are just my names for them):

• The complete synopsis (or scene list)
• The long synopsis (which is usually two to five pages)
• The short synopsis (one full page)
• The pitch (two to four paragraphs)
• The tagline
• The formula compare (something like, “It’s Rivendell meets Friends.”)

That’s a lot of different descriptions, and even though they vary in length, it’s usually not too easy to convert one into another. That’s because, as I said, they serve different purposes. For all of them, I would start with your audience-neutral description you did first, and work from there.

The Scene List

A scene list is primarily useful as a prewriting or editing tool. It forces you to map out the actual structure of your story, down to the very building blocks, and then gives you an easy place to spot errors or weak points, to tinker and rearrange.

To make a scene list, you start at the very beginning of your story, and write one to two paragraphs describing what happens in every scene. When you’re finished, you’ll have your entire plot down on paper — every twist and every turn — without all that messy set design, characterization, and description.

I have known of some editors or agents who wanted, essentially, a scene list when they requested a synopsis. That’s because some editors and agents want to know how well you can build a story, not just how pretty your words are. Nothing reveals your ability with story structure more clearly than a complete scene list.

The Long Synopsis

Actually, that’s the purpose of all three synopsis types — to show how good you are at building a book (or, anyway, how well this one is built). The problem is, a scene list can be a tedious affair, and every agent or editor I’ve ever known is just ridiculously busy.

As a result, most of them want something shorter than a scene list (which could easily run to fifteen or twenty pages). Instead of accounting for every brick in the wall, they just want a scale model. You job is to convey the shape of your novel, including the beginning, the major obstacles along the way, and the end.

Yes. The end. Writing a solid climax and satisfying resolution is one of the hardest parts of storytelling, so you have to tell the end. Worried about it seeming flat and boring? Good. Work hard at making it sound just as powerful and interesting as it really is, even if you’ve only got a page to do so.

The Short Synopsis

You should really be doing that for the whole book anyway, and when you get to the short synopsis, you’ve only got one page for all of it.

When it comes to the short synopsis, you can think of it more like the stuff you’d find on the back cover of a paperback. It’s almost marketing material, drumming up a powerful intro and characterization, hinting at a world, and suggesting a direction for the plot. Give yourself two-thirds of a page to do all that, then start a new paragraph and give away the ending. Briefly sum up the plot (the middle), and the climax and denouement (the end).

This is probably what most agents are looking for when they ask you to attach a “synopsis” to your query letter. Ninety-five percent of the time, they’re either looking for this, or the long synopsis I described above (which is why it’s good to go ahead and prepare them both).

Figuring out which one a particular agent prefers can take some serious research, and sometimes it’s just plain impossible. In those cases, I’d just go with the one you think better sells your storytelling.

The Pitch

Once you’ve got the short synopsis done, you’re nearly finished. The rest are much shorter, starting with the pitch.

The pitch is most of the body of a query letter. It is, in essence, your book’s elevator pitch. It’s two to four paragraphs that express, to an audience already prepared to appreciate it, exactly what is awesome about your book. It’s very much a sales pitch, and if you undersell your book in the query letter, chances are the agent won’t ever bother reading the attached synopsis.

On the bright side, though, once you’ve got your pitch perfect, you have already finished writing most of your query letter — a task many authors dread.

The Tagline and the Formula Compare

That just leaves your one-liners. A tagline is the one-sentence description you might see on a movie poster. Something like,

“In a world overrun by flying fish, only a maniac paperboy stands a chance.”

Or (and this one is near and dear to my heart),

“It’s like 1984, but happy.”

I like to use the tagline as the second sentence in my query letter (following close on the heels of, “I’d like you to represent my novel”). Then I personalize, give some qualifications, and follow up with the pitch. That’s your whole query letter, in a nutshell.

The formula compare is similar to the tagline, but more cynical. The formula compare suggests any new story can be described as a (sometimes clever) combination of two known stories. “It’s Cinderella meets Die Hard,” or “It’s Twilight, but with vampires.” Something along those lines.

The formula compare is lousy marketing copy, but it’s incredibly helpful shorthand. At the very least, you should come up with a comparison you like, so you can offer it as an alternative when someone describes your work with one you don’t.

Photo credit Aaron Pogue.