So I’ve got this synopsis. It’s not perfect, by any means, and it has a lot of work to go before I’d let myself send it off as an actual submission piece. (Of course, so does the story!). It’s written, though, and it’s got a lot of information in it that I hadn’t realized/known before, and it’s woken me up to some goals and needs of my hero.
Overall, a good thing. An exciting thing, because I’ve now got more of the story in front of me, and inside my head, than I did when I started.
Temptation.
How great would it be, this week, to do a restart, head back to the beginning of the story, and start putting together all the things I know now. Pretty great. And pretty silly.
Because, realistically, I don’t know the new, improved story all that well. I know it as a series of facts, of phrases and sentences shuffled together into some semblance of logic and pattern. I know more of what happens in the middle than I used to, and I do have some exciting fun ideas about the opening. And I definitely followed the summary out to the end, through the crisis and climax.
Here’s the problem, though. I haven’t written that crisis or climax. And I”m learning, from experience, that you really don’t know your story–even the pieces you’re pretty darned sure of–until you’ve written it all. And even then, often, what you really have is a more complete set of questions you need to answer, more glittery luminescence to make the holes in your plot and characters a lot more obvious. And you also get ideas. Sometimes they look like a mix of a pretzel, an old slinky, and a big pile of cat hair. Sometimes, when you’re lucky, they look like the best kind of fairy dust. Either way, you’ve got a lot to work with.
So I’m resisting temptation. I’m going to keep writing forward, until I can type “The End” on a first draft, not just a synopsis. And, obviously, I’ll be hoping for fairy dust.
Becky Levine 