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.
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.
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?
Yes, I was surprised too, but that’s what my agent said. And it will turn out to be an advantage in the end. I’ve only written one other story where I had everything worked out beforehand, which was The Wages of Sin, and although the working out was a pain, it meant the actual writing was a joy. So this may well turn out to be a good thing.
I’m in the editing stage with two historicals at the moment – The Reluctant Berserker and The Crimson Outlaw – so there are some historicals to come. Storm Seed is planned as a Fantasy, but after I’ve done that, I am thinking of doing sequels to both of the upcoming historicals. Certainly I’m thinking of two more in The Crimson Outlaw line, as I have two more characters I’d like to give happy endings to 😉
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…
and by “them” I mean of course any fantasy book, not yours in particular.
*g* No, it’s fine – I can’t expect people who like historicals to welcome the fact that I spend a lot of time writing the kind of books they don’t like. I wouldn’t, if it was me as a reader, realizing that an author I liked was going to write fewer of the books I liked.
I saw this and thought of you…
http://kjcharleswriter.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/writing-the-synopsis-giving-the-editor-what-she-wants/
Oh, that’s very interesting, thank you! I’ve got a ten page long synopsis so far, and another which is already three pages and nowhere near finished. I wonder if I’m going over the top with that? (But the book is nearly 150K long, so 10 pages is already quite a squash!)
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.
*g* Well, my plot planning was interrupted by the fact that edits on two new books came in at once. So over the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing edits on The Crimson Outlaw and The Reluctant Berserker at the same time. I’m no further on with the plotting at all, and no writing is being done either. Still, it’s all necessary so I can’t complain too much.