Plot Plan Pain

Writers hate writing synopses, am I right? I think I am. So now imagine my plight – I have four of the damn things to write at once.

9_of_365_Frustration

I suppose, technically, that only one of them is a synopsis and the others are plot plans, but that’s not making things better.

The situation is that The Glass Floor is finished and ready to be sent out to publishers, but Fantasy publishers are notoriously not fond of stand alone novels. They typically want trilogies. Therefore I need to write a synopsis for The Glass Floor (done) and also a synopsis for two other novels after it, (tentatively called The Gate of Ice and The Lightning Isle) which I have not yet actually written.

Then – because there will inevitably be a long delay while The Glass Floor and its planned sequels are shopped around – I need to start writing something completely different. (Currently being called Storm Seed.) So I need to think up a plot plan for that too.

On the one hand this will be great – I’ll have ready made plot plans for those novels for when I start writing them. On the other hand, argh, thinking up the entire plot of a book before I start writing it is the hardest bit. To have to do it three times in a row with no actual writing in between is frying my brain.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

9 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
HJ
HJ
11 years ago

That does sound like hard work! I’m surprised that the information on the proposed sequels needs to be as full as a synopsis; since they’ll be accompanying a true synopsis of an already written book, could they not be more like the blurbs on the back cover i.e. give quite a bit of detail on the set-up and then fade to three dots?

As a reader who really isn’t keen on fantasy, could I put in a plea that the “something completely different” which you write while shopping around your trilogy be non-fantasy, please? or have you gone over to the dark side completely?

HJ
HJ
11 years ago

Hurray for the historicals! I hope you don’t feel I’m being negative about your fantasy books – you must of course write what you like!! For every person like me who doesn’t like them i seems there’s more than one person who does…

HJ
HJ
11 years ago

and by “them” I mean of course any fantasy book, not yours in particular.

Char
11 years ago

Catching up on blog reading after a vacation not too far from you – London for a week and then Cornwall – okay, that isn’t exactly close!

I don’t envy you one bit. How’s your plot planning & synopsis writing coming along in the 2 weeks since you’ve posted? I have trouble writing the synopsis after I’ve written the whole novel, let alone trying to write it one out before I start the writing. My novel origins have tended to be more outline than synopsis-type.

9
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x