Picture this if you will:  I’ve been working to build a compelling synopsis for my first book.  I’ve written it and rewritten it several times.  But I still don’t like it.  Several different people have suggested that I let it sit for a week.  Come back to it with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective.  Great advice, except, the darn thing never leaves my thoughts.

Am I the only one with this problem?  The only writer in the entire world who can’t seem to let it go?  I know I have a tendancy to focus (with a laser-like, frightening intensity) on the project at hand.  It becomes virtually impossible to think about anything else.

Sometimes that’s a good thing.  Take Nanowrimo for example.  I had this massive challenge that taunted me, pointing and giggling every time I looked up from my keyboard.  I wrote more in twenty days than I had ever written in my life.  I crushed the challenge.  One might think that my focus was a benefit.  I certainly did then.

Now, it’s in the way.  I’m desperate to start plotting my next story.  I’ve all these ideas clamoring for attention in my head.  But somehow, they aren’t finding their way to paper.  Not yet anyways.  I’ve had offers to read my synopsis when it’s done; to critique it so I can find ways to make it even more compelling.  I most gratefully accept those offers, but somehow, I can’t send out something that doesn’t feel perfect.

Am I stalling?  If I am brutally honest with myself, I would have to answer “YES”.  I think part of my perfectionist nature is a fear that people won’t like what I’ve done.  Constructive criticism I can handle.  Outright dislike might be something else entirely.

At the same time that I think I’m stalling, I also realize that the drive to get the synopsis done (and perfect) is an effort to get my book back out looking for a publisher.  Getting books published has always been a goal of mine.

So which is it?  Is it stalling or driving forward that doesn’t let me put the story aside?  At the end of the day, the reason is unimportant.  Letting the story rest, truly rest, is.

So here is what I propose:  I will put the synopsis out to pasture until next week and I will begin the exercise of plotting my next story.  I will also work on fleshing out a couple other story ideas.  Then, we’ll see what happens.  To those of you who offered to critique my synopsis, it’s coming.  But not yet.  It (and I) need a breather for a few days before we’re ready to move forward.

Have you ever had a scene in your head that just won’t go away?  It’s kind of like having that annoying tune running through your head that you can’t get rid of (usually something like Barney singing “I love you, you love me…)… oh dammit, not again!

What about if it’s well into your story and you’re not ready to write it yet?  I’ve read interviews from several professional writers who say that they don’t write their stories in sequence.  They do things kind of like film directors; everything with a certain setting or group of characters gets done at the same time regardless of where it fits into the actual story.  For them, writing out of order is natural (so they claim).

I don’t know about you, but I NEVER have a story so fully formed in my brain that I can write scenes out of order.  Usually when I try that, I end up with a terribly disjointed mess.  If you can do it, I tip my hand to you.  I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with writing my stories linearly.  At least, for now.

So what to do?  Do you simply leave the story idea rattling around in your head until you get to it?  You could do that, I suppose.  It can definitely become a strong incentive to get writing just so you can get it down on paper.  Or you could try something different.  Here’s what I did for my book.

I had this great idea for a scene in my head (as opposed to having it in my spleen) that I thought would be fantastic.  It was a bar-fight where my two protagonists, who were very much at odds with each other, would get involved in a knock down, drag ‘em out fight that would bring them closer together.  I knew how I expected their relationship to be going into the scene and how I wanted it to be as they left it.  Sounds simple enough, right?

The problem was, I was at a point (writing point, that is) in my story where the two had only just met each other.  The bar fight was several chapters away.  Lots of stuff could happen in between.  Stuff that might make writing the scene out of sync a problem.

I was a bit unsure of what I should do with it.  On one hand, it was this really exciting idea that I couldn’t wait to put down on paper.  On the other, I knew whatever I wrote I might have to throw away because it conflicted with something that happened before.

I made a compromise.

I put down every single element of the scene that I thought was important down on paper in point form:  the protagonist’s relationship with each other before and after the fight, where it happened, how it happened and who was involved.  I even wrote a few sample paragraphs of the more exciting ideas (no sound effects though).  Lastly, I made sure that the scene tied into the overall storyline.

So what actually happened when I got to the bar fight?  As I expected, things had changed somewhat.  The character’s personalities were subtly different from what I expected and the relationship was different too.  Also, some of the fringe characters who I had initially envisioned as becoming part of the story never did more than get beat up in the fight and push my protagonists closer together.

It’s still one of my favorite scenes in the book and I did use most of the material I thought was important.  And I’m very glad that I didn’t fully write out the entire thing as I first planned to.

At the end of the day, it’s whatever works best for you.  If you’re able to write your story in bits and bites tying it all together into a nice package, do that.  If you’re like me and need to write in a more linear fashion, put down copious notes with a few “sound bites” to give flavor to the idea.  Once you get there you’ll be glad you did.