my downfall, the synopsis

Writing stories? No problem.
Finishing a novel? Barely broke a sweat.
Writing a synopsis? ...I'm absolutely terrified.

According to the author and agent blogs that I stalk, a synopsis is critical when you're trying to get your story published. You need to be able to sum up all of the plot and mention each important occurence in the novel, so that the agent and editor can see that you can do plot, and handle character progression, and all that jazz.

I don't think I can do it.

Any time I've been asked to sum up Thistleswitch, I come up empty. "What's your story about?" leaves me speechless, because it's not really "about" anything. It's about the characters, and it's about the setting. It's not really about a plot, because the only weak plot it has is "A hero goes on a quest to marry the most beautiful princess in the world, and encounters obstacles and hilarious shenanigans along the way." Would I pick up that book? Maybe if the cover was snazzy. But a synopsis in a letter to an agent doesn't come with a cover, snazzy or otherwise.

Not only that, but you apparently need to have synopses of different lengths. Your "short" synopsis is one to three pages long. Your "long" synopsis is somewhere in the six to ten range. And every published author or agent who talks about this seems to think that writing a synopsis that only takes up three pages is hard, because there's so much to go into it. Now, I think I'll have a problem with a three-page synposis, but it's because I don't know if I can fill it up.

Granted, I haven't attempted it yet. Maybe when I actually try to write this synopsis, I'll face the former problem rather than the latter. But I don't particularly want to write one, because I've been completed freaked out by all of the blog posts I've read about how vital a good synopsis is and how completely screwed you are if your synopsis stinks.

I thought that writing a 70,000 word novel was the hard part. Why is one page so horrifying?

fifty fairy birth gifts

I took a day to savor the fact that I actually completed a novel. But, as mentioned in this previous blog post, when publishing a novel an author has a MUCH better chance if they have more than one book in the works. And, frankly, I've got six different main characters bouncing around in my head now that Merry, Niko and Aries have finally gotten their story told and relaxed - I've got three different stories that I desperately want to write. Can you blame me for wanting to get started?

I haven't actually "started" my second book, yet. I already had a brainstorm document going for it, and I've spent the majority of the afternoon figuring out some of the characters. Since the main character, Jovie, is one of the seven daughters of the king of Afalanphra, that means that I have to actually name and acquaint myself with all seven of those daughters. And, because a big part of the story centers around fairy birth gifts, I've been figuring out five unique personality traits for each princess, plus the three princes that are involved in the story. This site has been fantastically helpful.

Sometime in the next few days, I might write my little prologue chapter for this as-of-yet-unnamed sort-of-sequel to Thistleswitch. Or I might take just a few more days to savor not writing before I jump back into another 70,000 word novel.

Yikes.

I wonder what percent of people who say they're going to write a second novel actually do it? Less than two percent?

the end

69,506 words.
That's how many words it took to tell the story of Thistleswitch. At least, to tell it at first. I know I have plenty of rewriting and revising and editing to do now, which will whittle down or jack up the word count. But right now...69,506 words.

I can't quite comprehend that it's done. But it is. I made a list of the order of events back when Aries, Niko and Merry first reentered the Thistlethought forest. It talked about the tangle tree, the skyders, the dragon, the ending. But I never really felt like I would actually get to write all of those scenes. I didn't feel like I would ever actually get there.

But I did. I wrote all of those scenes, without skipping to them and leaving parts out of the middle of the story. Thistleswitch is a complete, beginning-middle-end story. I've never written a complete story before on my own.

My senior English teacher used to tease us crazy kids about how often we used the word "epic". "Wow, that was an epic party last night!" and "Did you see The Hangover? That movie is so epic!" It got on her nerves, because she said that what we considered epic wasn't really epic at all.

But I have to say...this feeling, right now...finishing a novel...

It's pretty dang epic.

chewy explanations

I'm at the end stretch of Thistleswitch, which means I'm at the point where I have to wrap up all of the little bits of the story. And, of course, one of the more major bits is the thistleswitch itself. I've just finished writing The Chapter in Which the Witch Explains the Switch, and I can't quite decide if I did a good job on it or not.

On the one hand, I think I explained everything that needed explaining. Why the Shift happens, how it happens, what the Whisperers have to do with it...all of that is in there. But, as with any situation where things are being explained to the reader, I can't tell if I got the pacing down or not. I feel like I shoved it all down the readers' throat in a couple of chewy paragraphs, which doesn't sound good at all. Then again, I don't really know another way to go about it.

And then there's the characters' reactions, which are important for obvious reasons. Sometimes I really have trouble balancing Aries, Merry and Niko, and making sure they're all present in a scene. Looking back, this bit is more like a conversation between Grandma Anine and Merry, with Niko and Aries apparently standing in the background and staring at their shoes.

I don't think I'm going to rewrite this chapter right now, because it's doing its job. This'll be one for the rewrite - finding out a way to explain everything that needs explaining, and include everyone that needs including, without making the chapter the most wordy thing in existence.

Do people ever stop learning how to write? Because I never have.

number crunching

I hate math (seems like most of the time, liking math and liking reading and writing are mutually exclusive) but yesterday I voluntarily did some calculations. Nothing you would find in a calculus class - though I did get a 4 on my AP calculus test, by the by, so I'm no slouch - but still.

See, I was trying to guesstimate how long Thistleswitch should be when it's finished. Apparently the normal word count for novels, at least according to Google, is 80,000-120,000 words. I figure a book for young adults, since I think that's my audience, would be 60,000-100,000 or so, which I've just hit the tail end of. But I was trying to see if that was a reasonable number of words, based on other novels that I like to read.

I used Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and Golden by Cameron Dokey - both excellent books that I recommend to fantasy-lovers. The former is about the length I'm shooting for, while the latter is quite a bit shorter. I wanted to find out about how many words each book consisted of, as well as how many words were in each chapter and how many chapters they had, just so I would know if I was going overboard or not.

I counted the number of words on an average page. I multiplied that by the number of pages, and then subtracted about 1,000 to account for all of the half-pages at the beginning and ending of each chapter. I also multiplied it by the number of pages in the average chapter. So here are the stats.

Howl's Moving Castle
Approximate Word Count: 80,000
Word Count on One Page: 246
Number of Pages: 329
Number of Chapters: 21
Approximate Words Per Chapter: 4,000
Average # of Pages Per Chapter: 16

Golden
Approximate Word Count: 41,000
Word Count on One Page: 234
Number of Pages: 179
Number of Chapters: 19
Approximate Words Per Chapter: 2,000
Average # of Pages Per Chapter: 9

Thistleswitch
Word Count Thus Far: 62,639
Number of Chapters Thus Far: 18
Approximate Words Per Chapter: 3,000

So far, Thistleswitch is fitting right in. Which, for once, is a good thing.

EDIT: Just doing some more recon, and I found this great blog by Chuck Sambuchino that seems to cover pretty much anything about literary agents. He had a post about word counts for different forms of writing, which also seems to demonstrate that I'm right on target.

Perhaps more than any other, YA is the one category where word count is very flexible.

For starters, 55,000 - 69,999 is a great range.

The word round the agent blogosphere is that these books tend to trending longer, saying that you can top in the 80Ks. However, this progression is still in motion and, personally, I'm not sure about this. I would say you're playing with fire the higher you go. When it gets into the 70s, you may be all right—but you have to have a reason for going that high. Again, higher word counts usually mean that the writer does not know how to edit themselves.

A good reason to have a longer YA novel that tops out at the high end of the scale is if it's science fiction or fantasy. Once again, these categories are expected to be a little longer because of the world-building.

Concerning the low end, below 55K could be all right but I wouldn't drop much below about 47K.

deadlines

As if it wasn't obvious enough before, I have officially proven that I don't do deadlines well. I've always been wary of becoming a "professional" author because they have deadlines, and I didn't think I would be able to write if I had to. And this past month has only demonstrated that.

At the beginning of June, things we going swimmingly. I was writing at least 1,000 words a day, sometimes churning out whole chapters. I knew that if I kept it up, I would be done with the whole thing by the end of the month. And so, stupidly, I told myself that I could finish by June 30th. That was the plan. That was the goal. That was the deadline.

And having that deadline made it absolutely impossible for me to write anything but crap drizzled with lamesauce. I would sit down to write, and my head would be blank. Or, worse, I would know what was sort of supposed to happen but be unable to find any words to explain it. I didn't even feel like writing Thistleswitch anymore, and I didn't even care that the June 30th deadline was approaching.

Skip ahead to June 30th, 10:00 p.m. I finally open up Thistleswitch after a two week lull. I tell myself that I'll just give it another try, and if it doesn't work out it's not the end of the world. I really didn't even care if I just ended up deleting everything I wrote for the dozenth time.

And I wrote. And the next day, July 1st, I finished my first chapter in a month. Just like that.

Now, maybe I psyched myself into being unable to write for the month of June. Maybe it was my own dang subconscious, refusing to work under these conditions and laughing in the face of deadlines. Maybe it was the story itself, telling me that it calls the shots and I'm only along for the ride. Whatever it was, it's made me all the more certain that I can't be an "author" in the career-sense.

romance, and why it's a pain in the butt

There's an odd conundrum associated with romances in "young adult" fiction. You see, the author can either have the obvious pair get together in the end, or not have them get together in the end. It seems like an easy enough decision - either you choose one, or the other - but there's no way to make either of them really work.

Pick up pretty much any teen read and you can pinpoint the main character and the love interest pretty much right off of the bat. The main character is the one narrating, or the one that the narrator follows; the love interest is nearly always one of the first five important characters of the opposite gender introduced to the story. The rebellious princess we meet in chapter one has a conversation with her old, fatherly tutor and the relatively unimportant filler male character who shines her shoes; has a playful argument with the boy she's known since childhood, who it is explicitly stated she only thinks of as a brother; and then meets the mysterious, brooding stranger who's secretly going to assassinate the princess, whose good looks are described in great detail and who immediately has some sort of confrontation/out-of-the-ordinary encounter with the heroine. I'm guessing you can figure out who will be making out by the end of the book.

The problem with this scenario is that you can figure out who will be making out by the end of the book. Real life isn't that clear cut, and it means that readers already clearly know at least one point of the story. There's no discovery involved, except for the expected discoveries that the characters make about each other to make them fall in love with one another at all. (I.e., oh look how gentle he is with that small, injured animal! He's dangerous and compassionate! Swoon!)

Then you have the stories that understand the First Five Rule, and either scrap it entirely or use it to trick the reader. Though the handsome assassin is described in a drool-worthy fashion and makes the princess feel all weak in the knees, she really ends up falling in love with the stablehand we meet in chapter eleven, because he understands the real her and isn't being paid to murder her. Bet you didn't see that coming, reader!

The problem with this scenario is that you didn't see that coming, reader. Throughout the story, a good reader is making connections between characters and predicting what might happen next. This means that once the reader has decided on the fact that rebellious princess and brooding assassin will be the story's romance, they file it away in a secret, unchangeable part of the brain. If this romance doesn't pan out in the end of the book, it will leave that reader with a little unsatisfied nagging feeling in that part of their mind. Don't get me wrong - some authors pull this off perfectly well. The example that comes to mind is, once again, the book I just read: Fire. At the beginning, I was dead set on the heroine ending with Mr. A; by the end, Kristin Cashore had convinced me that she belonged with Mr. B. But I find, at least personally, the chances that I'll be content with a different pairing than the one I originally wanted are slim. The stablehand could be the nicest guy in the world, and fit with the princess perfectly, but it won't matter to me in the end: he's not The Original Guy, so he's not The Right Guy.

Personally, I prefer the former approach to written romance rather than the latter. 99% of the time I read for entertainment, and I don't want to get to the end of a novel only to be disappointed that the "right" characters didn't fall in love. It's gotten so bad that occasionally I'll flip through the back of the book, just to make sure that there's a happy ending back there in my taste. I have nothing against writers who go with the second approach - a surprising romance is certainly one way to make a story stand out from others. But in my own little world, being cliche (goodness, I feel like that word is batted around too much these days - maybe that will be the subject of my next blog)...anyway, I don't think that being cliche is all that bad. Yes, I can predict that the rebellious princess and the brooding assassin will end up together. Yes, it's a slightly obvious plotline. But, well, it's cliche because it works.

I realize that this is my own opinion - I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who scoff at all that is cliche and much prefer an unexpected coupling. But, heck, this is my blog. If I want the princess and the assassin to live happily ever after, they dang well can.

reunion

I wrote more words.
Almost 2,000 of them.
July, I like you already.