Blurb Before Story
Welcome to my Monday morning blog, which is basically me smashing out a few half-baked paragraphs about whatever’s on my mind. I’m no article writer, so please don’t expect anything polished or SEO-compliant, but here goes anyway... About a year ago on Twitter, in response to the common gripe that writing book blurbs is a nightmare, someone claimed to habitually write theirs before even getting started on the story. I was so impressed with this idea, which does sound kind of barmy, true, that I tried it myself. And two novellas later, I have to say I’m a convert. Blurbing first allows me to get the essence of the story down in writing, and that blurb then acts as kind of a pole star to guide me as I pants the first draft. I may need to tweak it as I go along, but so far that’s been easy enough. Pushback to this idea (when I float it, which isn’t very often) generally comes as the claim that “I don’t even know what the story is yet, so how the hell can I write the blurb?” Which for me r...
