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Synopsizing

Last week I finished revising the final scene of Beekeeper. Yay! Only, we're never really done, are we? Over the course of this round of revision, I had pulled together a short list of scene snippets that I wanted to shoe-horn into the narrative and quality checks that I'd stumbled over during the weeks of drafting. 

After a bit of heel-kicking and whining (I just spent 44 days heads-down revising my novel! I was tired!) I got to it. The two quality checks were: 

  1. Assess that each chapter has a unique goal. A friend in my writing group suggested this as a way to ensure that the pacing is moving along and that the character agency is clear. 
  2. Make sure each event can be linked by the words "therefore" or "but." If I remember correctly, this exercise was suggested through Writing Excuses (but don't ask me which episode). If two events can be linked by the words "and" or "then," there isn't enough causality to string the novel together, and there's likely a tension problem. 

In the past, when I've attempted similar exercises I've done them at the scene level. This is part of why I was so loath to begin the exercise: there's a lot of scenes in a novel! Because I was running out of revision steam, I combined the two exercises and completed the "therefore, but" assessment at the chapter level rather than the scene level.

I summarized each chapter's goal into one sentence (completing exercise #1), and then added the word "therefore," "but," "and," or "meanwhile" to the end of each chapter goal relative to the following chapter (exercise #2). And voila, I had a clear map of potential pacing, agency, and causality issues. Through this method I identified 5 chapters where the character's goals didn't clearly link to the following chapter, and I found two chapters where the character's goal hadn't changed in 6,000 words. Both of these issues were surprisingly easy to resolve. 

And. 

In addition to this roadmap of revisions, I had a 450 word synopsis. In order to keep my chapter goal summaries to one line, my chapter goals mostly covered the character arcs and emotional reactions rather than being very clear on the plot. Obviously a synopsis that doesn't include plot is not finished, but, any time I've written a synopsis I've gotten feedback that it's too plot-centric and doesn't capture enough of the character's why. Having a 450 word roadmap of my character's emotional arc allowed me to (hopefully) draft a stronger synopsis. Once I added in the plot details, my draft synopsis ended at 780 words, which is not too bad! 

The synopsis isn't done yet, and I'm sure neither is Beekeeper, but this exercise ended up being an efficient way to identify and resolve several problems concurrently, and I will definitely be adding it to my writing toolbox going forward! 

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