"One sentence. Two at most. If you can't tell yourself what your story is in one or two sentences, you're already running into trouble. Even in Moby Dick, it comes down to Captain Ahab chases a whale and doesn't get it." Gerald Petievich
This is so true. A writer must be able to relay the basic premise of his novel in as few words as possible. After all, when you submit it to an agent for consideration, you have to include a synopsis - so you might as well start to think about that from the beginning. My first novel, Tell Me That You Like It, is about what happens when a kidnapped child is returned to her family after five years of imprisonment. When I first tried to tell people what the book was about, I wrestled with what to include in the description. Should I talk about child prostitution and pornography? That was a part of the story. Should I talk about the emotional adjustment the child and the family went through? That was part of the story. How about the police investigation? That was certainly part of the story. But, see, those things were just that: simply parts of a whole. They are important and they make the story interesting, but they are not the basic premise.
The novel I am working on now is about secrets and how they affect the lives of my characters. I have to resist the urge to spill out all the details about each individual character - the problems they face, how they relate to one another, etc. If I keep my focus on the main plot, I am less likely to "chase rabbits". A more detailed synopsis can come later when the manuscript is ready to be released into the world to shop for a publisher.
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