Shifting Gears
A more apropos title for this blog is Waiting Sucks, but I had a feeling that wouldn't be politically (or writingly?) correct, so I ditched it in favor of what I'm doing. Switching gears while I wait.In the last two weeks I've finished a couple of big projects. Sent a full ms to my agent, which I've yet to hear back on, and finished a proposal I'm very excited about. I sent said proposal to my CPs and want to get their feedback before I zip it off to my agent. (*Ahem* No Pressure or anything girls. Not like I'm waiting with bated breath here or anything....) The problem? The proposal is in a genre I don't normally write, so I don't want to write the full until I get a nod from my agent as to whether or not she thinks it has a chance to sell. It would be a waste of my time. In addition to that, because I just sent her a full, the odds of having her get back to me right away on the proposal are pretty dismal. I'd love to say, "Hey! Read the proposal first and tell me if I should keep going with it!" But I'm not sure that would fly.
So in the meantime, I'm left in a quandary. Keep writing on the proposal and see where it takes me? I'm in that mindset. But what if the idea flops? Then I'm wasting my time. My other option is to totally switch gears and start a new proposal for an RS idea I have. But jumping from one idea/genre to another is messing with me right now, especially when all I want to do is keep working on the first.
This isn't an issue I've really had to deal with before, though I know it's something published authors do all the time. Write a proposal, send it off, wait to hear, work on something else. It's a new concept for me to work around. Just about the time a proposal is done I'm getting to know my characters so well all I want to do is keep writing their story.
How do you write? Do you write proposals or fulls? Do you wait to get a nod, yay or nay, before you move on, or do you not care? Have you ever written a full only to have a CP, agent or editor tell you, after the fact, it didn't work? And if you do write proposals and switch gears as you wait, any tips or tricks for jumping from one project to another so you don't go loco?
Labels: Elisabeth's Posts
posted by Elisabeth Naughton at 8:00 AM
4Comments:
I'd PLANNED to start writing proposals when I had my agent, but turned out I have to write fulls. I have to see where the story goes. I'm always afraid I won't be able to get back to the book, to love it the way I do when I start, you know?
I can understand that, Mary. Do you write a synopsis before you dive into a book or do you wait until you're finished?
I'm not at the proposal writing stage -- my publisher won't buy on proposal yet.
However, I get the "changing gears" thing -- when I'm working on a WIP, sometimes these things called edits show up in my inbox, accompanied by another pesky little thing called a deadline. :-D
This is where I find having a synopsis for the WIP is crucial, E -- I need to be able to easily come back to where I was in the story before I knocked off to edit something else.
Usually, after I finish the first three chapters of a book, that's when I write the working synopsis. It's my litmus test to see if an idea is going to work or not, in the big picture.
I'm learning, albeit slowly, Lin. ;) The synopsis I wrote for this last proposal was 20 pg (J told me it was a bit loooooong. LOL) But since it was just goign to my agent to give her an overview, and because it's mostly for me to know where I'm going when I get back to the story, I don't care. I can definitely see the plus in writing a synopsis now. (Man, I can't believe I wrote that let along thought it. I've fought the suckopsis theory for longer than I can remember.)
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