I was planning to write a follow-up post about writer’s block, but I walked into another kind of writer’s dilemma, so I thought I’d write about that instead.
My query letter for the novel is ready for the most part. One of the agents I’m looking at also requires a 1-2 page synopsis. As I was working on that, I thought of a scene that needed to be added to further develop the plot.
Not a big deal, I thought. A thousand words, maybe--something I could write on a single night. I threw a quick summary of the scene into the chapter where it will live and started reading the rest of the novel from there. That was when I realized that the new scene opened up two major plot-holes.
Great, I said, and started filling in the plot-holes. One thing led to another, and I soon realized some other flaws in the current manuscript. The main character has glasses in the opening scene, for example, but they are not mentioned again. And he gets thrown around quite a bit, so it’s a detail I need to address.
There’s also the fact that the novel takes place in present day, but not a single one of the kids in the book has a cell phone.
Both of these sound like small things that might not make a big difference, but they’re large enough issues in my mind to justify reading the novel one more time and making some adjustments. And I still haven’t finished writing that thousand-word scene that triggered all this.
So what’s my point, besides whining a bit? My point is that before you query an agent, your novel needs to be as perfect as you can make it.
And if that means biting your lower lip and reading the whole thing one more time to get every detail just right, then that’s what you’ve got to do.
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