The Difficulty of Explaining the Idea
When I finally got up the nerve to tell my own husband that I was writing a book, his first question was, unsurprisingly, "What's it about?"
"Uh...there are people...who look like animals...and stuff happens to them?"
I don't think I really sold it to him.
I'm getting better, but I still struggle with explaining my story to people in a concise way. I've got a blurb about the book in The Project section of the site, and while I'm not fully satisfied with it, it's the best I've come up with so far.
I've discovered that this is a common problem amongst my writer friends. It feels especially embarrassing because in calling ourselves writers, we thereby claim some talent in the crafting of the written word, yet we still can't come up with a few sentences to describe our own stories.
I think it's being concise that's the problem. I wrote down nearly 80,000 words in which I built an entire world and brought to life dozens of people who didn't exist before. How am I supposed to condense all that into a single paragraph? And how am I supposed to remember it when I'm put on the spot by curious friends and family?
If I ever plan on querying this thing, and I do, then I'll have to figure it out. Maybe in another five years when I finally have a draft to give to beta readers, they'll have some wisdom for me. Until then, I'll keep polishing away and striving to make both my story and its blurb better one nap time writing session at a time.
