Stuffing an Elephant into a Bird Cage or How to Cram an Entire Novel into a Synopsis and Not Go Crazy

A few weeks ago I chatted with my agent on the phone for nearly an hour. It was a good talk. She had attended the big book fairs during the spring and it was good to finally catch up with her. I was thrilled to find out she is currently reading The Tale of the Vampire Bride. We discussed the book and its sequel at length. She feels strongly that this is my next book that we should pitch and I agree. I especially enjoyed it when she laid out what she felt were the strong points of the character, plot and the narrative. It validated what I already felt about this particular book.

"Is there a second book?" she asked.

I told her there was a second and possibly up to three more after that.

Then she said the words I feared, "Send me a synopsis for the second book."

EEK!

"Okay," I said, my mind whirling. "Uh...but I don't know how it ends."

"Write what you know," she answered.

Crap!

Happily, the next day I had a "Matrix" moment and it was as if my entire novel was downloaded into my brain in a second. I suddenly had all of it, beginning to end. But I still had no idea how to shove that entire story into a synopsis.

I put off the synopsis for nearly a week as I cruised the Internet for advice on how to write one. I have failed utterly in writing a synopsis before. I just couldn't imagine successfully writing one this time. In fact, this task seemed more daunting than even writing a book. It felt like I had been asked to stuff an elephant into a small birdcage. How the heck was I going to compress an entire book into ten pages or less?

Finally, I hit on the blog of Karen Harbaugh. Part of the way down the page (as you scroll) is a section called "Karen Harbaugh's Index Card Method of Writing Synopses." Reading over the post, it utterly made sense to me. I broke out my hot pink index cards and a purple sharpie and started scribbling.

After two days of furious typing, I had my synopsis. I didn't even fill the cards out all the way before I knew exactly what I wanted to write. I sent it off to my test readers, tweaked some things per their suggestion (adding time frame, explaining a plot point a bit better) and sent it off my agent.

What did I hear back? She liked it! She thought it had some really great stuff in it. Yay!!

So now I'm working on the next synopsis I owe her. I'm using the exact same method, but also utilizing yWriter as well this time. I'm writing a summary for each chapter in yWriter in the chapter tab. When I'm done, I'll just export the synopsis using these chapter summaries (I love yWriter) and revise from there.

Have I conquered the Synopsis Monster? Not yet, but I have a better handle on what I'm doing now.

What Is The Color of My Character's Eyes Again???

Writing is a bitch. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It is so much more than sitting down and putting pen to paper, or fingers to a keyboard. Think about how many people have told you that they are writing a book, but have never finished?

Yeah.

It's that hard.

It's not just the whole process of transferring a story idea from your imagination to the written word, but also making it a compelling read for your future readership. There are a lot of components to a good story, but today's blog is about characters.

You can have a great story, but if your character doesn't come to life in the minds of the readers, the story will most likely fall flat. As coincidence will have it, Rosemary on Genreality tackled the subject of characters just a few weeks ago when I first started composing this post.

To quote the first comment:

Charlene Teglia
I pretty much only keep books for character. If I don’t connect with the characters, who cares what happens to them?

This is exactly my sentiment. If a character doesn't feel alive or sympathetic to the reader, what is the point? This is especially the case in horror. Where suspense and the horror element are vitally important to keeping the reader on the edge, they must invest their emotions in the characters.

People often ask who my characters are based on. I think it's a natural assumption that a writer must be basing their characters on people they know (or themselves), but this isn't the reality at least in my case. A lot of my characters just pop into my head at unexpected moments.

I will give you an example:

Maria Martinez appeared in my mind unexpectedly one day. I was at work, thinking about how hot it was outside and how glad I was Texas doesn't have rolling blackouts when I saw in my mind a woman sit up in bed, her long hair falling over one shoulder as she listened to the power go out in her section of her city.

From the rough draft of her story:

The fan sputtered than died as the rolling blackout hit her section of the city. With a groan, she peeled the covers from her damp body and sat at the edge of the bed. Her silky black hair fell over one shoulder, settling over one bare breast. The heat was already rising in her small flat. The metal walls and high windows made the narrow room claustrophobic and once the power cut out, stifling.

I quickly wrote down what I "saw" in my mind's eye and that is the opening paragraph of my brand new novel. It wasn't until I was able to sit down and keep writing that I found out what her name was, where her city was, who she was in bed with, and the cause of the rolling blackouts.

This sort of character inspiration moment has happened to me multiple times. I see the character in an compelling setting and I dive in wanting to know more.

In the past, I kept loose notes on characters or story scenarios as they came to me, but I lost a lot of them. During our latest move, I found some scraps of scenes, characters, and stories I had forgotten. Thankfully, I started using yWriter a few years ago and it has helped me tremendously with keeping my notes of inspiration in a safe place.

Using the Character database, this is how I built a character file for Maria Martinez.


The first tab up is basic. It's about her name and description. Sometimes I only have a first name when I start a character, so I just fill in the short name. If I have a full name, I plug that in. If there is a nickname, I place it in Alternative. Since this is the start of creating Maria's biography, I don't know if she has a nickname yet. I can come back later and change it if she does.

I write in a general physical description so I can remember her exact appearance without having to go back through the pages already written, desperately trying to find out what color her eyes are.

Also, she is a major character, so I have clicked that option.

Sometimes a character's biography comes swiftly to mind. Other times it comes out it spurts as I write. I try to update the biography as I work so I have a quick reference the further I get into the story.

Maria's biography came to me around 3,000 words into the novel. I find the more fully immersed I am in the writing, the clearer I "see."






Under notes I usually place personality traits or quirks. Also, I might add any notes on the development arc for the character if I have a clear vision of where the character is headed during the course of the story.











Finally, I add a picture to the database so I have a physical representation of the character. In this case, it is Maria created using the Sims 2 games. When I started playing Sims 2, I had a lot of fun with the actual game. Then, one day, I created one of my characters on a whim. Seeing my character on the screen looking eerily close to how I imagined her was a real inspiration. Since then, I have been making most of my characters in the Sims 2 character generator.

Sims 2 version of Maria Martinez

I have read about other authors clipping photos out of magazines or printing them from the internet so they have a frame of reference for their characters. Having a visual is a neat way of keeping connected to your character. Honestly, there are times in the process when you can lose your way and having visual clues back to your story are very helpful.

So how did Maria pop into my head? In some ways it feels like magic, but looking into my past I see the seeds of her inspiration. Growing up one of my favorite people was a friend of my mother's from the Dominican Republic. She was one of the most beautiful, classy, and stylish women I had ever seen in my life. Also, she was one of the kindest, warmest, most considerate people I have ever encountered. Her life was not easy in any regard, but she had a strength about her that was inspiring. Widowed extremely young, she had difficulty letting go of her husband. I remember his picture on her bureau and how lovingly she had arranged mementos around it. I can see how my mother's friend inspired Maria's great love for Dwayne and her strength of will.

Yet, they are not the same person and far removed from each other in personality.

Every day writers absorb their surroundings, storing away information in the depths of their minds, tiny seeds germinating to become worlds, characters and stories. Those little seeds can be anything from the distinctive voice of someone you meet, the gray eyes of someone you see on a plane, the laugh of a woman after a car accident, etc...etc... I'm not always sure where my characters come from, but I am glad when they arrive to tell their story.

I Think I'm In Love With Morris Rosenthal...

Okay, not really. But I think I'm a die hard fan of his self publishing blog and his youtube videos. He is wry and funny with his delivery and freaking smart. When my husband came to me about self-publishing the zombie novesl, Morris' website was one of the first I hit for information.

Though Morris writes non-fiction books, his advice is still excellent. I am a fiction author, but I have a fan base already (and a freaking awesome one at that) so I feel I may have a head start on a lot of fiction authors heading into self-publishing waters. He's written a book Print-on-Demand Book Publishing: A New Approach To Printing And Marketing Books For Publishers And Self-Publishing Authors that I am extremely excited about reading. I hope to use as sort of a how-to as my husband and I work toward the publication of the first As The World Dies novel. I have ordered my copy and I'll be watching like a hawk for it to hit my mailbox. Morris seriously rawks.

But I've been looking at other resources as well.

The other blog I've been cruising around is the SmallPress Blog. I check it for any news on how Amazon is handling print on demand books along with Writer's Weekly. Amazon has been changing the rules a bit (making small publishers use their print on demand company) and I'm not quite sure how its all going pan out, but I'm watching with great interest. Another resource for keeping up on the latest in self-publishing is the PoD Publishers Yahoo Group.

Because of my budget I'm going to be going with Lulu.com for my trilogy. The books published by Lulu are not a sloppy job at all and I've read lots of good things about the overall quality of not only the books but the service. Their forums are also a really good resource I highly recommend.

I also like Write and Publish Your Own Book. They have a lot of good short articles about every aspect of writing and some very good advice. It's an interesting place to drop by and take a look around.

To learn about publishing as a whole....well...I've been hitting a lot of author/agent/publishing blogs. It's been interesting reading to say the very least. The more I read the more confusing it becomes. It's hard to see a pattern in it all and I'm starting to think there isn't one other than if your manuscript is not what they agent/editor is looking for, its over.

Even the advice on how to write a synopsis or query letter changes from blog to blog, writer to writer, agent to agent. It's kinda...well..nuts.

There is also advice everywhere on how to find the hot market and gear your writing toward it. I remember reading on an author's blog about a year ago how her friend (also a writer) was trying to write paranormal romance. Now this was not that writer's forte, but her publisher was pushing her in this direction and she was at a loss as to how to proceed. So the author friend offered her a reading list of materials so she could figure out how to transfer her writing into the paranormal realm.

When I read this I thought "But aren't we supposed to write about what we know and love?"

Anyway, one last great resource (this is for you KingMonkey), is the Fast Draft and Revision Hell with Candy Havens on her Yahoo Writing Group. I freaking love how she challenges the writers on this group to really push themselves.

And of course, I cannot recommend yWriter enough .

KingMonkey, seriously, the best step to editing your Behind Stone Walls will be transferring it into yWriter. It will give you a whole new way of looking at it. I promise.

Okay, now that I'm done with this late night post because of not being able to sleep, I'm going to try to entice the sandman once more.

The Joys of yWriter

Last summer when I participated in the Fast Draft challenge on Candy Haven's yahoo group, I happened upon a post where someone was raving about yWriter. I googled it and found spacejock.com and all his cool programs. They are freeware and amazing tools.

yWriter and yBook were my first downloads and I absolutely love these programs. Both have made my writing life so much easier.

yWriter is a great project manager for your writing and a valuable tool for any writer who feels overwhelmed by the process of getting their whole story down. I'll try and explain a little of how it works and why I love it so much.

First off, you create a project (novel) in the program. You fill in the name of the project (novel) and your name as the author. Then, using the menu bar, you can add chapters to your project. The default number is 25, but you can change this. There are three panes in the project window and on the left pane, you'll see all your chapters show up with their word counts (zero, of course, when you start). Yous you fill these chapters up, you'll see your word count per chapter. This is a great way to set goals for yourself.

Click on a chapter, use the menu bar to add a scene (or three). You can add as many scenes as you like per chapter. When you click on a chapter in the left pane, in the top right pane the scenes in that chapter are listed. To edit the scenes you can double click them to open up the text box where you can actually write the scene. At the bottom of the box are tabs with all sorts of great options to help your writing along. In fact, one of the things I love about yWriter is you can track which version of the scene you are working on (outline, 1st draft, 2nd draft, etc), which character's POV it is; the goal, conflict, and outcome of the scene; and all sorts of other good stuff.

Kingmonkey asked how I managed my first draft from moviesonline and fanfiction.net when I rewrote it. Well, I made a new project in yWriter, added a bunch of chapters, made empty scenes in each chapter, then began cutting and pasting each entry from the forums into their own scene. This enabled me to get a good handle on the story right away. I could clearly see the breakdown of each chapter and how the scenes all fit together. I even dragged a few scenes around, added a few, etc, without having to do the continuous formating you have to in Word.

I also made sure to build my character database where I included their physical descriptions, a photo of what I thought they looked like, and a basic personality write up.

It's a program that is a little intimidating at first, but once you figure out how it works, it makes your writing life so freaking productive. The best part is that you can export your project and edit it in Word or Openoffice once you're done with the novel. yWriter isn't an editing tool, but a writing tool. You'll need to use Word or Openoffice to run spell check or grammar checks.

One of the things I love about the program is that if you want to skip a scene and get onto another one that is hot on the tip of your fingers, you can write a short description of the scene you want to write later and skip onto the one you want to write NOW.

I have mad love for this program and I love its companion program, yBook, where you can load up your manuscript and read it like its a paperback on your screen. Being able to visualize your writing in novel form in yBook makes it easier to read for editing purposes (you can't edit it in yBook, but you can have it running in Word or Openoffice behind yBook to fix up anything that needs tweaking). Plus seeing your manuscript looking like a paperback is a big inspiration.

I am very serious about my writing and I think yWriter is the best program out there. I can't imagine writing without it.

Check out yWriter 4 here http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4.html and give yourself a few hours to get accustomed to it. This is a great user guide to get you started http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4_Quickstart.html

Once you start using it, I don't think you'll want to stop.