Tuesday, February 3, 2009

One-Sentence Summation

Randy Ingermanson is called "the Snowflake Guy" for a reason. He wrote an article called "The Snowflake Method" that you can view here. The very first step in his method is to take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of my novel. When I started working on this post (several hours ago), I wrote that this probably wouldn't take an hour...but boy was I wrong! This is actually very difficult!

Randy says this sentence will serve me forever as my 10-second selling tool. He says to go for short (15 words or less) and to include no character names. He also says to go to the NYT Bestseller lists to see their examples (although many of the one-liners I read there made me not want to read the book, and they were way over 15 words!).

So, I've done all of the above and these are what I have to show for it:

--An emotionally-wounded social worker battles her mental disorder while learning to trust again. (14 words)

--A social worker battles her mental disorder and past emotional wounds while learning to trust again. (16 words)

An emotionally-scarred social worker battles her mental disorder, reopened wounds from her past and uncertain growing feelings for an attorney who holds her future in his hand. (28 words)

--A social worker fights past wounds, including a mental disorder and fickle fiancé, while her unexpected attraction for an attorney may give her reason to trust again. (27 words)

A social worker battles her mental disorder and wounds from a fickle fiancé while facing her biggest fear of trusting again.

--A victim of rape, a social worker battles her mental disorder while her unexpected attraction toward an attorney may give her reason to trust again. (25
words)

A rape survivor battles her mental disorder while her unexpected attraction toward an attorney may give her reason to trust again, her biggest fear. (24 words)

A rape survivor battles her subsequent mental disorder as well as her unexpected attraction toward an attorney who represents a spiritual and emotional threat to her carefully ordered life.

OKAY! WOW. I could go on forever and ever rearranging a few words to look different, but I'll stop now because I need to go to bed. Might revisit this tomorrow after sleeping on it. Whew!

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