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 raises several questions. Is that what a blurb is, a summary of the story? If so, is that why people struggle to write blurbs? Because they’re trying to shoehorn all their ideas into a couple of paragraphs?

I don’t know, but I have a feeling it is.