Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

We’ve been discussing for the last week how to write a one-sentence summary of your novel, as I advise in my article on the Snowflake method.

Barbara emailed me with this very long one-sentence summary of her novel:

Three disgruntled scientists are hired by a biogenetic research laboratory — run by a clandestine government agency — to evaluate possible modifications to lower life forms, never realizing their results will be used to alter the human genome.

As Barbara noted, it’s too long, at 36 words. The question is how to shorten it. I believe in making it as short as possible, but no shorter. Let’s see what we can do here.

One thing we can do is to change the subject of the sentence. There is no rule that the subject has to be your protagonist. Why not make it the government agency? Let’s try this:

A secret government agency manipulates three disgruntled biotech scientists into research that can be used to alter the human genome.

That’s 20 words and I don’t think it’s lost anything. By being shorter, it may even have gained. Less is more in this game.

Can anyone improve on this? You folks are getting quite good at this!

Let’s do another contest, shall we? Whoever comes up with the best revision by Friday night at midnight, PST, wins a free one-page critique from me. This is Barbara’s novel, so she gets to decide which version is best.

Go to it!

Carrie kind of cheated, by posting a one-sentence summary today, which is about four days after the deadline. But it was excellent! Should I reward her tardiness by saying how much I like it? Yeah, I think I’ll do that, because she’s way too late to be eligible for the prize, which I already handed out.

A forensic artist stumbles upon the killing grounds of a vengeful serial killer.

Randy sez: Hey, this is really good! I like it. Let’s see why this is so good:

1) Forensic artist–this is good. It tells us quickly that we’ve got an interesting character.

2) Killing grounds–a cliche, but a good cliche. And stumbling on it tells us this artist is gonna be in jeopardy. Very good! The one thing I’d say is make it “stumbles on” rather than “stumbles upon.” I have no idea which is more grammatically correct, but mine sounds less pedantic.

3) Serial killer–yes, yes, yes! That hits all the right hot buttons. I’d say to lose the adjective “vengeful.” Personally, if I’m up against a serial killer, I really don’t care if he’s vengeful or not, because the guy is bad news. Drop the dead weight word.

So my suggestion:

A forensic artist stumbles on the killing grounds of a serial killer.

I like it! I’d buy this book!

For those of you just joining us, I’ve been critiquing one-sentence summaries of novels that folks have submitted recently. Yesterday, I critiqued one by Alie.

Alie took another shot at her one-sentence summary today and it’s definitely better. Here’s what she wrote:

An award-winning advertiser suspected in two murders spanning a decade races to clear his name.

Now that I understand the story better, let me punch it up a little more. First of all, I would lose the “award-winning” descriptor. I can’t give a clear reason why, other than that it doesn’t do much for me. Second, I’d drop the bit about the decade. Truth is, if the guy’s been a suspect for a decade, then the case against him is weak. Third, I’d add some time pressure. I’m going to guess that if this poor guy is suspected in two murders, maybe a third is on the way? So here’s what I’d try (but bear in mind that I may be guessing things that aren’t in Alie’s story):

An advertising executive, suspected of two murders, must clear his name before the real killer strikes again.

Admittedly, there’s a bit of cliche here. But let’s face it, one-sentence summaries often have cliches in them. Cliches are quite compact ways of saying what you want to say.

Whaddaya think? Are we getting warmer?

Today I’ll critique another one-sentence summary. I’ll do Alie because she’s first on the list and because she took two shots at it:

My original one was: Running from his past brought him straight back to his future.

I just came up with an alternative: Ten years; two murders; one suspect racing to clear his name.

Randy sez: Both of these are problematic. Let’s look at the first one. We have a single character mentioned, but all we know about him is that he’s a man. That’s too vague. A key part of any one-sentence summary is the two or three word description of the main character that gets you interested in him. This is an art form. Remember how Chris grabbed our attention? His character was “A retired marine.”

By the way, I like the idea here. It just needs to be better in focus. The other main issue is that we need to know more about what “Running from his past” actually means. What did he do? Rob a bank? Kick the dog? Inquiring minds need to know!

A one-sentence summary needs to be quite specific, but not too specific. So tell us who he is, what he did, and what trouble he’s in now. All in 15 words. Not easy.

The second version is quite a bit better. It tells us that murder is involved, which is always good in a novel, even if it’s not so nice in real life. And we have a much clearer goal–one suspect racing to clear his name.

But it needs to be even more sharply in focus. What sort of person is this suspect? A Buddhist monk? A diesel mechanic? A one-armed trapeze artist?

And what exactly is he accused of? Murder, apparently, but murder of whom? His best friend? His worst enemy? His accountant?

Here is the one-sentence summary for my first published novel, TRANSGRESSION: “A physicist travels back in time to kill the apostle Paul.” That sentence helped me sell a lot of copies at book-signings and in general conversation. You only have to hear that one sentence to know if you want to read the book or you don’t. This is another example of a sentence where the kicker comes at the end. Traveling back in time is cool. Killing is always an attention getter. Bit the apostle Paul is what makes this into a “high concept” story, because if you kill Paul, then you might in principle really screw up history.

So that one sentence of 11 words had almost everything: weird science, violence, and religion. The only thing missing is romance, and as it turned out, the book had a bit of that too.

Wow, it’s been a long day today. Last week, a documentary maker called me to ask if I’d be a last minute addition to a documentary he’s doing. I said yes, so I spent all morning putting my thoughts together. This afternoon, the cameraman arrived and we shot for about three hours. More details on that when I hear from him on whether I did well enough that he’ll actually use some of my footage.

Then I spent a few hours reading the last few manuscripts on my stack that I’m judging for a contest. The deadline for judging is tomorrow, so I needed to wrap that up today. This is a contest for unpublished authors, so you expect to see some novices and some good writing. One of them was a real wow. I can’t understand why this author isn’t published yet, but he or she soon will be, I’m pretty sure. It’s always exciting to find a new author who is EXCELLENT.

Between all that, I’m feeling utterly thrashed today. It’s a good kind of thrashed. Tomorrow, we’ll look at some more of those one-sentence summaries that many of you submitted last week.

The original version of the winning one-sentence summary by Chris was as follows:

A retired Marine travels to Iraq to begin his own private war against the foreign terrorists that murdered his daughter.

I made minor revisions to this as follows:

A retired Marine launches his own private war in Iraq against the terrorists who murdered his daughter.

Mary pointed out that the word “terrorists” carries more emotive punch than “Iraq” so it would make sense to switch the order and say “against the terrorists in Iraq”.

This is a good point, and I’m almost persuaded, but not quite. What we have here is a sentence with rising emotive force, with the most punch at the end with the phrase “murdered his daughter.”

I think it makes sense in this case to leave the order as I wrote it, so that we go from “Iraq” to “terrorists” to “murder” to “daughter” in a rising crescendo. A sentence like this would be enough to get some serious attention at a writing conference, if given to the right sort of editor. (Editors looking for the next “Pride And Prejudice in Palooka” are not the right sort of editor for this story. Editors looking for the next “Die Hard” or “Rambo” are gonna eat this kind of thing up.) Of course, it would need to be accompanied by three strong sample chapters.

The analogy to haiku is quite apt. It’s very hard to write a one-sentence summary, but it’s really worthwhile.

One comment today asked if it’s possible to write a one-sentence summary about a story that’s told in first person POV. The answer is yes. Do the one-sentence summary in third person. Then write the sample chapters in first person.

I would love to critique another one-sentence summary tonight, but I’ve got a cameraman coming to the house tomorrow to shoot some video for possible inclusion in a documentary. I need to get ready for that. More details later.

I saw several one-sentence summaries that I liked. But one of them jumped out at me because it looked extremely professional. It was submitted by Chris and here’s how it goes:

A retired Marine travels to Iraq to begin his own private war against the foreign terrorists that murdered his daughter.

It’s not quite perfect, but it’s awfully close. Here are the things to like about it:

1) “A retired Marine” — this immediately tells us a lot about our character.

2) “travels to Iraq” — tells us the setting right away, and it’s a timely one.

3) “to begin his own private war” — yow! This punches all the right buttons for those who read this kind of novel.

4) “against the foreign terrorists” — good, because everybody hates terrorists. You can lose the word “foreign” since that’s a given.

5) “that murdered his daughter.” — this punches all the right emotional buttons. Now we’ve got a motivation that won’t quit until justice is served. Put Bruce Willis in this part and the movie’ll be a winner. Grammatically, you need to change “that” to “who”.

My suggested version, with minor revisions to punch up the verbs a little and shorten the sentence:

A retired Marine launches his own private war in Iraq against the terrorists who murdered his daughter.

Chris, email me a page of your current work in progress for your free critique.

It’s not yet midnight, so I won’t announce a winner yet for the best one-sentence summary. I can see one that stands out above the rest, but I won’t tell you who until tomorrow. There are a LOT of very interesting summaries here! I think I’ll critique a number of them over the next few days.

In the meantime, it’s appropriate to congratulate Mary DeMuth (RelevantGirl), whose first novel WATCHING THE TREE LIMBS was named a finalist today for a Christy award in the “First Novel” category. The Christy awards are the “Oscars of Christian fiction” and they have become extremely difficult to win in recent years. Attagirl, RelevantGirl!

To honor Mary, I’m going to critique her one-sentence summary, which has some problems:

Anguished by guilt, 12-year-old Jed tries to right the wrong of refusing to walk Daisy home, by investigating the mystery when she’s gone missing.

Randy sez: The king once said to Mozart, “Too many notes!” With some trepidation, I’ll echo that here: “Too many words!”

The hard part is doing justice to this story in just a few words. I’ve read the first 40 pages, and I think I’m starting to understand the story. I think the first three words, “Anguished by guilt”, are too focused on Jed’s inner conflict. I know that inner conflict is critical to the story, but first things first! A one-sentence summary needs to first summarize the external conflict and then add in internal conflict if there’s room. In Mary’s version, there is no hint that Jed is a horribly abused kid. I may be wrong, but I think that’s important to say, because it gives us immediate sympathy for the character. Here is my best shot at it:

An abused Texas boy takes refuge in a search for his missing best friend Daisy.

Normally, I don’t use names in a one-sentence summary. So I replaced “Jed” by “Texas boy” (I think this story is set in Texas) because I wanted to capture some element of the place. Notice that I broke my rule and used the name “Daisy” here. The reason is simple. I want to make it clear she’s a girl (that puts some romantic puppy-love tension into the sentence). But it’s a little hard to capture the relationship between Jed and Daisy in a few words. She’s 10 and he’s 12, so she’s not exactly a girl-friend. But just calling her “best friend” wouldn’t work.

Mary’s version was 26 words. Mine was 15. I bet one could do better, but that’s the best I can do in 15 minutes of trying. Who wants to improve on it?

There were a number of comments today on the writing sample I analyzed yesterday. D.E. Hale wrote:

Ok, see now I’m confused. I understand that a “rule” can be broken, but how do you know when to split up the motivations and reactions into separate paragraphs, and when to leave them all bunched up together? You mentioned that since there was no conflict that it wasn’t necessary to split it up into paragraphs, but I think I still would have.

This is a good question. I would keep the motivations and reactions all together here because it would start feeling very choppy to break them off into separate paragraphs. This sequence is leading up to some action, but the action hasn’t started yet, so I think it’s best to just blitz on through and get to the action.

There is a deeper question, however: How do you know when to break the “rules?”

My answer is that you are allowed to break the rules after you have mastered them. The rules are just rules of thumb that help suggest the reason that you are failing to create a Powerful Emotional Experience. But if you ARE creating a Powerful Emotional Experience, then there is no reason to apply any rules. In my opinion, Pam’s done a fine job of launching this scene. So I wouldn’t change it, other than to fix that phrase “her heart lept in her throat” to “her heart leapt into her throat.”

I’d say we’ve about chewed all the sugar out of this stick of gum, so let’s move on.

How about another little contest? In my Snowflake method, I teach people to write a one-sentence summary of their novel. Let’s hear yours!

Post a one-sentence summary of your current work in progress. The most intriguing entry (in my sole judgment) before midnight PST on Friday night will win a free critique of one page of your novel by me.

Today we’ll look at a new 2-paragraph submission, this time by Pam Halter:

Home was a stone cottage she shared with Krezma, the woman who took her in when she was a baby. It sat in the forest outside the village of Broem. They had a well on the side and a root cellar just off the kitchen. The roof was covered with moss, and yellow bell flowers filled with nectar grew all around the cottage, attaching themselves to the stones.

About half way home, Akeela noticed a trailing mist of dark purple leading deeper into the woods. The stench of rotting eggs permeated the area. Her heart lept in her throat. She had encountered the strange aura and bad smell before. It meant Tzmet, the witch, had passed through. No wonder the animals and fairies were frightened. Akeela glanced around, tightened her grip on the bow, then left the path and cut across the woods to the pond.

Randy sez: Paragraph 1 is all telling. Not a single MRU to be seen. And it works. I’m going to assume this is really early in the story, so it makes sense to be telling who Krezma is. The word picture of the house where Akeela lives is very sharp and clear. Well done!

In Paragraph 2 we’ve got a sequence of very short Motivations and Reactions. Normally, I’d say to split these into separate paragraphs. But I don’t think so here. There’s not a lot of conflict in this paragraph, so there’s no point in stretching this segment out. The paragraph moves the reader economically toward the conflict that appears ready to begin.

Both paragraphs work very well as they stand. I wouldn’t mess with either one.

Anybody want to try to improve on this?