Archive for August, 2008

So I just finished the synopsis for Four Shards of Heaven. It’s only 1000 words long, but I have to say it was a difficult 1000 words to write. How do I distill everything that happens in this book, with all the different points of view, into less than one percent of the words it took for those events to play themselves out?

I’m wondering now if this is the sort of thing best accomplished before one writes the novel. I don’t know that the way I write would allow that — I profoundly enjoy the surprises my characters often have in store for me — but it’s a good theory.

At any rate, having the synopsis done gets me one step closer to seeking representation. Other than hearing from the readers who have the novel at the moment, the only things left on my to-do list are (1) writing a basic outline for the sequel (and perhaps beyond?) and (2) composing a basic query letter.

… that’s how long the first draft of Four Shards of Heaven is in manuscript. 108,819 words. I finished going over it this evening, cleaning up the inserts I made and catching a few errors here and there. I also did a search for a few phrases that I thought might be showing up far too often. As writers we tend to find little short-hands for passing on information, and sometimes we can become over-reliant on ones that feel natural to us.

For example, my characters tend to take a lot of deep breaths. They also nod. A lot. So I had to go through the book and cull dozens of these gestures, inputting new ways to convey what I wanted the reader to feel or understand.

One can also get too attached to a particular turn of phrase. I thought, even in writing the book, that I might have used the phrase “the world + some verb” on more than one occasion. E.g., “The world went dark around him”; or, “The world spun.” Well, when I finally finished and did a search for this construction, it turned out that I’d used it more than a dozen times, which meant it was losing any efficacy it might have had.

It’s frankly difficult for a writer to notice these sorts of things him or herself. If you do, you know it’s bad.

I think I’ll start keeping a physical list of my overused wordings, which will no doubt grow longer as other folks look at my work with more objective eyes than I could ever manage.

Anyway, the manuscript is now off to a couple writer friends who volunteered to read the whole in order to give me final feedback before I send it off to agents. Which reminds me: I need to start writing a synopsis of the book. Apparently I’ll be needing that!

I took a few days off from actually writing anything related to Four Shards after I finished it up last week. Things were percolating in my mind, though, and today I set about doing some revisions to the first few chapters. Though revisions are tremendously tough to do for me, the day went well. One particularly troubling chapter is much improved. Alas, the changes have mostly added rather than taken away. (I have never, personally, been able to do that “cut 10%” ideal folks talk about.) So the book is now closer to 109,000 words long. I’m through over a sixth of the book, though, and I imagine things will get more smooth as I get further along.

On the very positive side of things, this has been my first chance to actually read through things, and you know what? It doesn’t suck.