Assess

where you are and where you're going

The forest-tree problem comes up a lot in writing. Your prose is tight, the characters strongly drawn, but what’s the big picture? Where is the story going? Regardless of where you are in a project — beginning, middle or end — this prompt asks you to put down in several levels of compression a summary of what you are doing, or plan to do. The goal is helping you focus and stay on point — or to change the point, if, say, you seem to be sliding in a direction different from the one in which you began. Such change is fine, in fact it can be fabulous for the energy of a project for it to take unexpected turns. Because meandering is natural to the writing process, it is useful for many writers to periodically stop and do an overview, to make sure the whole has the coherence they want.

PROMPT

1. Write a paragraph describing your project, where you are in the writing process and where you want to get this month (or week, or year). 

2. Write a single, tight sentence about the project that includes a title (even if it’s a working title), the setting, and the most important character or characters.

3. List three things you need to work on. These could be writing tasks on any scale: a page goal, developing a particular character, purging cliches, addressing a pervasive technical issue such as tense or point of view, writing a missing chapter, adding flashbacks, eliminating needless repetitions. Be ambitious here but not absurdly so.

4. After you've done some of that work, you might want to go back to the single sentence and try to turn it into a "pitch" and to the paragraph and try to turn it into your fantasy jacket copy. Let these documents remain alive, changing them as the project evolves.