You might be facing the 80 percent barrier. It’s the moment when your book is 80 percent complete, and now the daunting task is to stick the landing. If you’re in first draft status, just writing to suit your soul, that pants-only process might be holding you back from typing The End.
It’s never too late to arrange the flowers of your story to make a completed book. Writing chapter summaries keeps you inside the realm of your book, simple work around its edges where you sum up what’s unfolded in each piece of the story. Index cards, or Scrivener, or a Word file with one page per chapter — anything to let you see the full story is useful.
A good chapter summary will focus on the major events of each scene
- What actually happens
- The gist of what the character is feeling
- Very high-level descriptions of anything else.
If it’s nonfiction, then the chapter summary is
- Over-arching subject
- Detailed aspects of same
- Takeaway from the facts, as an insight
A good chapter summary runs from one to five sentences. If you’ve got more than 150 words for any summary, you’ve gone too far. These chapter summaries give you a way to assemble the first 80 percent of your synopsis.
A synopsis reveals the ending
To be clear, a synopsis reveals the ending to the story. Faced with writing the ending to a succinct, two-page synopsis, you’ll find it easier to apply some additional action, changes in feelings, and a resolution. The synopsis will lead you back into creating the missing 20 percent. The missing writing may not be any better than the first 80 percent. But now someone can read your book and deliver comments and notes to improve and change it. It’s harder to do that when the book is unfinished.
Make no mistake. Summing up a chapter in 150 words or less is not an easy task. The writing of those summaries helps you measure the contents of each section. Too much, or not enough? Writing it down helps you see.
Why summarize? Well, it gets you to the finish, doesn’t it? The next step in the process isn’t querying agents or pitching to a publisher, even though you’ve got a completed full draft. It’s getting some beta readers to look over your book.
That beta reading will deliver even more if you’ve sent the readers a line-edited draft. You finish, then your expression gets smoothed and enhanced. It’s that thang what we editors do. In contrast, your betas are there to talk to you about your story and your characters’ fates. Only your very best pals, or your family, will even agree to read that book of yours before it gets an edit. You could even lure them into delivering on their promise by just sending that line-edited first chapter. Give them something with polish in order to get the most that you can out of their devotions.
