What is your novel about?

This can be practice for the one line "elevator pitch." However revved a writer can be with the work, the idea is to get an editor/ agent/reader revved as well. How would you change your "what's it about" to make it irresistible to that crowd?

Practice I've done for this is to make a pitch for books by other writers, then apply what I've learned to my own.

This practice can be applied to movie scripts as well. Imagining your book as a film can provide a different perspective and help a writer boil it down to the basics. We're used to friends asking "what's it about?"

My novel is about misunderstandings.

Two civilizations who have developed separately, without knowing anything about each other, meet and a war starts between them.

The two civilizations are completely different and what they see on the other side is so weird that they simply can't make heads or tails of it. In the real world, we have various ideologies in constant competition, but they can't conceive a society so different from their own.

I am describing situations from one side and from the other side and how they both are trying to make sense of things. (The real-world reader will of course understand what is going on.)

The latest one I published, which title might be translated into English as "Rightness' Friends", happens in US, Arizona, in a frontier town named Nogales, which has a twin with the same name in Mexico, just across the valley. There is no clearly mentioned year when it happens, but it is sometime 1974-1982 (with a sort of an epilogue about 8-10 years later. Last chapter, not exactly an epilogue but similar). It is young adult, dealing with first love, jealousy, friendship, honour, but also good and bad choices, forbidden love, morals, gang wars, the high price of fame and young success (in sports and music) with the related high performance expectations and pressure which some can resist to, some can't, carreer choices, suicide and those left behind with guilt, rage and depression for having not been able to prevent it. It also explores the worlds of mariachis and of bullfighters.

Gillhoughly's advice is excellent and I'm going to try to follow it. I encourage everyone else to do so, as well.

Here's the finished novel I'm currently editing:
A young mage on the run from his future gets kidnapped by a girl fleeing her noble family's past and dragged onto a collision course with a ruthless emperor and his powerful servants.

Next on my to-write list:
An apprentice bodyguard and the precocious mad scientist he promised to protect struggle to save their world from a body-absorbing alien nanotech plague, assuming the seismically active planet doesn't kill them all first.

flowerburgers said:

Gillhoughty thanks for the advice! For now, I already have an agent interested, but I'll bear that in mind if she ultimately passes.

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Even if it sells, you'll have to have a one-line elevator pitch ready for potential readers asking you what's it about.

When I started out and got that question, I'd launch into a description of the opening and wander off into plot points. Their eyes glazed over with remarkable speed. I soon boiled it down to one line and let their imaginations fill in the rest.

If I only get one line:
An assassin is hired by the king to kill innocent, upstanding, citizens in search of a death that will produce a ghost.

If I get to add a few more lines:
The assassin hates killing innocent people. Trapped between his own morals and disobeying a sovereign ruler, he secretly investigates why the king needs his own citizen's ghosts.

My WIP is about female friendship during devastation and historic social change.

It's even less upbeat than it sounds.

**waves hands vaguely**

Anxiety. It's about anxiety.

And fairies.

ooh anxiety and fairies! I'm interested!

One sentence is so hard!

A half-breed Leprechaun, outcast from his own community leaves home to learn more about his humanity, only to find that life outside the Sidhe Circle is more complicated than he thought.

Current; Two different women in two different worlds share one life between them, and one of them wants to die.

Previous; A young oracle who suffers from hallucinations and delusions, struggles to separate her visions from her imagination.

Twins, pirates, a magic ring, and a bad guy who lives in a volcano.

In the novel I just started writing (book 3 of a trilogy), the protagonist must face the man she previously "PK'ed" (player killed) in their shared virtual world. Will they both have the strength to forgive each other for a past transgression?

The Breakfast Club on the Camino de Santiago. Six delinquent teens choose The Walk program over juvenile detention, and spend a portion of their summer under supervision walking the ancient pilgrimage to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Current one: Grief and moving on. Also a love affair between Dr Moreau and Victor Frankenstein! Sort of.

Previous/"Next on the editing table" one: Hiding, finding, and secrets. Possibly a play on senses, mostly touch vs sight/hearing, which I still need to develop. Also Darwinism gone mad! Sort of.

A Los Angeles criminal attorney, who's sworn to to have no contact with his mafioso father, his enabling mother, his infantile brother, his malevolent sister or her scheming, climbing husband has the choice made for him when his NY to LA plane is struck by lightning over PA.

jjdebenedictis said:

**waves hands vaguely**

Anxiety. It's about anxiety.

And fairies.

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*waves*
My current WIP I just started is about a girl with Anxiety trying to find something that makes her world feel real. No fairies, though.

A physically mute ex-felon named Justin seeks revenge and redemption by hunting down his evil estranged father, Travis, after being contacted by him and offered a part in an illegal job.

Gillhoughly said:

This can be practice for the one line "elevator pitch."

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A Sci-Fi based story about a unique woman and her partner who foment a revolution to change a dystopian society.

Imprisoned in a hidden valley, her third eye opened against her will, my MC searches for escape, until she is blindsided by a boy more trapped than she is.



I keep writing these one liners and can't tell if they sound like nonsense or not. Book flaw perhaps

pingle said:

Imprisoned in a hidden valley, her third eye opened against her will, my MC searches for escape, until she is blindsided by a boy more trapped than she is.



I keep writing these one liners and can't tell if they sound like nonsense or not. Book flaw perhaps

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If this is for a YA novel, I think it works. Sounds exactly like one.

New member, first post. Just completed novel about a modern, newly de-regulated Chinese oil Baron who discovers a new source of power. He intends to provide free Power to the masses, overthrowing the Chinese government and setting himself up as the reincarnation of the most powerful Chinese emperor; Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor.