Agent jokes that all I have to do is add a little more dialogue and I'll have the book. *But*, another person in the business told me that long, long outlines aren't always a bad thing. If you're trying to sell outside your established genre, and the editor is looking for assurance that you can hit the marks and pull it off, the more detail the better. This made me feel better because I don't think I'm genetically capable of writing a short outline.
Your agent could probably tell you this as well <g>. My agent says that the more he has in hand (up to and including a finished book), the easier it is for him to make a sale. Not even outside of our genre -- but if you were going to make the jump to a different publisher, for instance, that outline, the ability to be that detailed, would be a good thing as well.
Did I mention that I'm impressed?
The other writer, a good friend, mentioned that she tried to write before she was ready, and when she read the work later, found it stripped of all texture and emotion. Bare bones, which needed to be scrapped or reworked entirely. It does come back, but if you try to force it before it's ready, you may be making double the work for yourself.
Wisdom, in this. Which is always a pain when there's a novel that's sold and a deadline that's waiting :/. I had to scrap hundreds of pages in my case, when my brain finally came back on line and I had the emotional energy to figure out why I was banging my head against the wall. I didn't mind scrapping them -- it wasn't a whole book, and I've done that as well -- but I would have been happier if I could have made use of what I'd written <wry g>.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-08-21 10:18 pm (UTC)Your agent could probably tell you this as well <g>. My agent says that the more he has in hand (up to and including a finished book), the easier it is for him to make a sale. Not even outside of our genre -- but if you were going to make the jump to a different publisher, for instance, that outline, the ability to be that detailed, would be a good thing as well.
Did I mention that I'm impressed?
The other writer, a good friend, mentioned that she tried to write before she was ready, and when she read the work later, found it stripped of all texture and emotion. Bare bones, which needed to be scrapped or reworked entirely. It does come back, but if you try to force it before it's ready, you may be making double the work for yourself.
Wisdom, in this. Which is always a pain when there's a novel that's sold and a deadline that's waiting :/. I had to scrap hundreds of pages in my case, when my brain finally came back on line and I had the emotional energy to figure out why I was banging my head against the wall. I didn't mind scrapping them -- it wasn't a whole book, and I've done that as well -- but I would have been happier if I could have made use of what I'd written <wry g>.