When I first started writing professionally, it was in the area of non-fiction. For more than a decade, I was a freelance technical writer easily earning an annual six-figure salary. During that time, I honed a method for approaching how to write, say, a manual on contract administration, and I used this same method when I began writing fiction.

That method was strict planning, chapter by chapter, and it concentrated on one question: WHAT. What happens in Chapter 1? What happens in Chapter 2? And so on.

Over the past couple of years, however, I’ve been playing fast and loose with that methodology and, in the past year, have discovered that I’ve been consistently moving away from the straight-down-the-line chapter-by-chapter outline. That’s not to say I’ve become a pantster (i.e. writing “by the seat of my pants”, otherwise known as “spontaneous” or “organic” writing). I dislike organic writing because it’s my opinion that it can so often lead to writing myself into a dead end, sagging middles, or — most wasteful of all — abandoned manuscripts. A plan of some sort negates a lot of those problems.

Instead of asking WHAT, I realise that I’m now asking HOW and WHY. And answering those questions doesn’t easily fit a mechanical outline. However, it does fit a synopsis.

Three books on, I’m finding that a synopsis is now the best vehicle for planning how I want my story to look. And, by reading the synopsis, I can also quite accurately estimate how long the story’s going to be. I suppose that bit comes with experience. The other plus with writing a synopsis is that my DevEd prefers it. He can quickly read through two pages and come back with questions on action, motivation and the general arc of the book. Not only does it sharpen my thinking but also saves us both a lot of time further down the track, when the manuscript has been written, double-self-edited and passed to him for further comments. (And has the potential to save the kind of re-structuring I had to do with THE CHECK YOUR LUCK AGENCY before it passed muster.)

The synopsis. I know writers usually hate them but I now consider them one of my tools to increase efficiency. Write the synopsis, write the blurb, then write the book. If the first two aren’t right, or at least sound the least bit compelling, then the book itself isn’t going to be right. That discovery alone (one week’s effort for synopsis plus blurb) is enough to save me two to three months’ worth of work, if not more in terms of possible rewrites.

I’d say that’s a pretty good trade-off.

ADDITIONAL The original two-page synopsis for BALANCE OF TERROR, the sequel to IN ENEMY HANDS, is now with DevEd for his comments. I’m hoping he likes what he reads but I’m also reminding myself that it’s much easier to fix the flaws in two pages of writing than it is to fix them in 80,000 words. I’m a lazy writer like that.