A friend who writes knows I am working on the novel, and offered a peer critique, so I am first presenting her with a ... a précis? A summary? It would be a treatment if it were fifty pages long, but it is only five.
And wow, if you want to highlight how puerile your novel is, whittle it down to five pages.
On the other hand, it has solved my problem with the last third, which is the whitest part of the whiteboard, where the outline just says “things get worse then better.” ”Seems that if you push your imagination past “then something happens” into a paragraph then it starts to fall into place.
The summary made evident that this book is blatant therapy. I used some form of the word “abandon” on every page. I’ll have to fight my instincts and delve. Ugh.
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