Skip to main content

tell-all thursday

Ahh, I'm off work early today to make up for early morning conference calls which would put me into overtime, and there is no working more than 40 hours a week for me!

I've been reading about novel structure and debating the way I want to put together my book. I found an interesting site site that reccomends writing a one sentence summary of your novel.

Here's mine:

A narcissistic woman copes with her ex-boyfriend's apparent suicide.

Next, the author of the website suggests that you take an hour and expand that sentence into "a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel." (The sentence itself was supposed to take an hour as well. I wonder if you think I spent an hour on mine.)

The paragraph is supposed to have five sentences and should read like back-cover copy.

This is fun.

Louivillian Laurel Lancaster's charmed southern world is quickly coming apart at the seams. After an alledged bout of mania, she spends two weeks in a mental health care facility. While battling to reintegrate herself back into everyday life, she receives news that her ex-boyfriend is dead. Laurel must cope with a death she believes she caused, and she discovers that the only redemption -- or perhaps the only punishment -- is to keep on living.

Hmm.
My paragraph is only four sentences long.

The structure is supposed to be:
1. story set-up
2. disaster one
3. disaster two
4. disaster three
5. end

I only have four sentences, because I only have two disasters so far. Well, three, if you count my perpetual avoidance of actually writing the damn novel.

Comments

Jm Diaz said…
That's not bad.. actually, you could probably make your character a writer, who has an unfinished novel and a publisher threatening to drop her if she doesn't complete it. There is no way she can focus to write with the other two things going on in her life.... and then her dog runs way. There, 4!

:)

Popular posts from this blog

fetal friday?

I know that I left everyone hanging yesterday. You know, when I went to pee on that stick. (That was mean of me. Not the peeing, but the leaving hanging.) Well, I think the big reveal is best expressed in letter form. Deep breath. Here goes. dear unborn baby daughter son or daughter, I take it back. I take back everything I said about not wanting kids. I was just scaredspice, and the slightest bit selfish, and maybe I had a giant fear of commitment. But, three positive test results in the last eighteen hours seem to say that you actually are in there, getting all comfy. I guess you'll probably be here in mid-December. I never thought about having a Christmas baby. (You've really put a wrench in my whole taking-maternity-leave-during-the-NCAA-tournament plan, but that's okay. At least it's basketball season. Don't tell Daddy yet, but you are going to cheer for the Indiana Hoosiers.) Speaking of Daddy, I take back all the mean things I've ever sa...

a little ashamed

I've been feeling a little guilty lately. I think I'm sort of obsessed with my own blog. Seriously, I adore coming home for lunch in the middle of my workday. My plan is always to sit down and write. It's the perfect time to work. There are no distractions (other than the hungry rumble in my tummy) or reasons that I shouldn't be able to churn out a good amount of words before I head back to the world of checking account deposits and cash-in tickets. However, I find that when I come home for lunch, all I want to do is blog. My reader is full as a good girl's Christmas stocking, and then there's my own post -- just waiting to be written. Something alarmingly witty, for sure. Something that will generate the multiple comments I will hungrily read from my cell phone when I sneak out for a cigarette break at 4:00. So, I avoid the writing -- you know, of the fiction variety. I sit here, instead watching the text fill the blank screen of a New Po...

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Seriously, Sarah? I am more irritated with you now than I was when you called Katie Couric perky on Oprah this week (and wasn't that the annoying pot calling the whistling kettle black?) and more irritated than I was when the interview with Katie Couric aired and you couldn't think of one book or magazine that you read on the regular. (Oh, I'm sorry - you chose not to disclos e the titles of books and magazines and newspaper you devour, because Katie Couric was annoying you and treating you like an uneducated inuit.) Maybe you should have just swallowed your ego and mentioned Newsweek. I mean, I'm not suggesting that the cover page would look different if you had, but could you try any harder to alienate the media? I know, I know, they are all evil, with their leftist agendas and loose morals. I understand. It's so difficult when the world won't give a feminist maverick a fighting chance, and harder still when that maverick has been ordered to stay on scrip...