Randy sez: Actually, it’s not a bad thing to add in a quick note about the setting in the one-paragraph summary. But be jealous of every word. For whatever reason, I didn’t include much on the settings in the example paragraphs. I could have, but just didn’t.

I guess that’s one more reason to be fairly picky about the setting for the story.

I really appreciate the examples you provide of how to reduce the apparently complex plots of widely famous novels and movies to five sentences, because it makes such an exercise seem really possible for my own work.

For a while now, I have been thinking a lot about how to reduce the clutter and deliver a sense of a streamlined narrative to people who ask what I am working on, and I can’t wait to try this exercise. Of course, this doesn’t mean that any of those great details and research that I mentioned above won’t be involved in the novel itself, they just aren’t, strictly speaking, essential to communicate what the book is actually about, and that is what I need to be able to do if I am to entertain any realistic dreams of selling the thing.

While the three act structure has been a large part of the instruction I have received from my professors of narrative craft, we haven’t spent a whole lot of time talking about the proposal and, as the case may be, the pitch. The idea of the act breaks and resolution that you describe in the five sentence summary is familiar and I am adhering to that structure in the writing of my novel, but I haven’t ever really considered just how scattered the plot must sound when I explain it to people without sticking to the main characters, the general conflicts and obstacles they face, and the general way in which these conflicts are overcome–or not, as the case may be.

I imagine that this advice will become infinitely invaluable when I am finished writing the novel and start looking for an agent and publisher.

Thanks for the pointers.