I’ve attended a lot of classes and seen a lot of books where writers are told that they should do periodic “writing exercises”. These are often set up using a line or a picture and the writer doing the exercise is told to write based on these.

It’s truly amazing and amusing to see what emerges when a set of different people, even those who all write in the same genre, are given the same starting point.

I’ve recently realized that I both enjoy and am good at these sorts of “author improv” tasks. It’s one of the few, if not the only, ones I like. Forget the round robin intros, forget the running monologues about why you want to write. I’m naturally fairly shy so those do nothing but scare me to death :)

Given the incentive, however, my muse loves to create backstory and circumstances to encompass just about any inspriation. Especially, it seeems, if I really SHOULD be writing something else.

But I’ve actually found these exercises have unexpected benefits and I now never throw away the results. More than once these have become stories all their own.

I’d heard other people espouse the value of these “writing exercises” and now you can sign me up as a believer!

C is off to play with “the gaming boys” for the day so Morganator and I are home together. He’s been happily playing in the nicer weather today so I’ve been sitting on the couch with my writing laptop, typing away.

I tend to get a bit … caught up… when I’m really into the writing.

Morganator comes in and sees me writing and notices that I have bare feet. Now I usually have on socks or my house boots because my feet get very cold but, in this case, I’ve been too distracted to bother. Doesn’t matter anyway – I stopped feeling my feet a few hours ago….

Keep in mind that he’s only six.

He walks over to me, bends over and feels my feet. “Mom, your feet are freezing. You know you’re supposed to keep something on your feet!”

He then proceeded to pick up one of the throws we have on the sofa and stands in front of me until I give up on the idea that he’ll just go away and look at him. “Pick up the ‘puter, Mom.” The exasperated tone is especially hilarious coming from him.

I lift the laptop’s tray and he carefully tucks the throw onto my lap and over my feet.

After I set the tray back down he gave me a look of true disgust and went back to playing.

He’ll either make some woman a great husband or he’ll be the death of me….

My friend Sasha White has a teaser up of her now book Trouble on her blog. You should all give it a peek. I loved it when I had a chance to read it in advance and I bet will too!

I’m borrowing an idea from my friend Lauren Dane’s blog. Each Wednesday I’ll be doing a blog post that has to do with writing and things I’ve learned on my own journey. Maybe some of it will help others who are starting the journey to publication.

I’d like to talk about that dreaded subject – Synopses.

When I first began writing, I really wanted to learn The Rules and read everything I could find. On some topics there was a lot of agreement. But the topic of Synopses was NOT one of those. Instead I found a huge disparity of advice – everything from the length being one page per chapter of the story to the entire synopses being only two pages long.

Most advice agreed that it should not hide things from the reader, it should lay out everything that was going to happen. It’s meant to explain the story, not entice a reader to keep reading. The readers will most likely never see it, only the editors and maybe your crit partners.

One thing that lept out was that most people advising new authors said to write the story first and do the synopsis when I was done with the story. So that’s what I did.

I must have started and stopped the first story’s synopsis about ten times. I had trouble figuring out just what details should be in it – was what seemed important in the story really important enough to make the synopsis? What did I do about things that were happening off stage and the book characters didn’t know about?

I think my first effort was about eight pages and I considered the entire process to be a circle of Hell that Dante never even dreamed of. I hated it. I struggled with it.

I showed it to several friends who were already NY published. The universal opinion was it was WAY too long and too detailed. With the help of several, I got it reworked into only two pages and still retained the feel of the story to at least some extent. I had no complaints that it was too short or not detailed enough. That story is currently sitting on some desks in NY.

The next story I worked on, I actually did a proposal for and wrote the synopsis first. Despite all the prior advice to write the story first, I wasn’t going to do that for this one because the editor was willing to take a proposal, even from a new author. The effort to write this synopsis was HUGELY less than that of the first book and helped to solidify the story in my mind.

Part of that, I think, is that I didn’t have the details in place to fuss over. I didn’t really know them yet. That made things a lot simpler from the beginning. The finished synopsis is still two pages long and I wrote the first three chapters based on the synopsis.

The editor liked the synopsis (she commented on it) and they bought the story based on it and the partial.

So – like just about everything else in writing – there is no ONE true way. I think I’ve found something that works for me and will most likely continue in that vein unless some compelling reason is found not to.

Write synopsis before story
Synopsis are limited to two pages

I hear this question asked all the time (in fact I’ve asked it of authors) and the most common answer I hear is that they wanted to be an author since they were a child or “always.” I must be one heck of a minority because I didn’t think I COULD be an author until about two years ago and didn’t want to make it my career until about 18 monts or so ago.

I grew up in Science Fiction fandom and I think because I knew all these authors, I had a very misguided theory that, if you had what it took to be a writer, these fantastic stories all practically typed themselves onto the page, fully formed and perfect and you didn’t really have to work at it. No one ever TOLD me this, I just never learned differently.

That is until a few years ago.

I’ve always been an avid reader and pretty creative in other aspects of my life. I bead, I make jewelry, I knit, I can probably learn just about any craft there is that doesn’t involve lifelike drawing (I have no visual memory so this just doesn’t work for me). I had been teaching other software testers at work how to test software for security problems and suddenly thought “There should be a book on this.”

I hied myself off to Amazon and hunted but nothing available fit the bill. The bug bit me and I then decided maybe I would just write one. Lots of research, lots of hearing naysayers and I had a polished proposal and an agent. While the agent went to work selling it, I went back to the day job.

The agent did sell it (despite the “test books don’t sell” phrase I kept hearing) and while I procrastinated actually writing it (whole ‘nother post on that), I started to wonder about writing fiction. By then I’d met fiction writers and really heard what they had to say.

I set myself to learning everything I could, joined a few groups, started to write reviews and the more I did, the more I realized that maybe I could do this too. It was work – hard work -but my prior idea that stories fell full formed was BS.

Of course, now that the Muse is out of her bottle, I don’t think there’s any putting her back in. And my new goal is to pay off the mortgage while I both write and work at the day job until I’m in such a postition as to be able to say I don’t need the day job anymore and retire from us to write full time.

A worthy goal, I think!