Story Summary Sybil
Friday, June 29, 2007, 5:12 PM

Okay, so I spent more than an hour yesterday writing a one sentence description about my as-yet-to-be-written novel. You know—like they do on the New York Times Bestseller’s List:

THE GOOD GUY, by Dean Koontz. An ordinary man finds himself at the center of a murder plot.

and

ON CHESIL BEACH, by Ian McEwan. A wedding night goes terribly wrong.

(Am I the only one who trips over this guy's name?)

Being the rewriting pro/cripple/addict I am, I wrote another one liner about the novel. And then another one, because who wants to leave well enough alone when something else might be better? I don’t know how long this took because I’m on vacation and I refuse to live by the clock, but when I felt my eyes doing the whirly-gig, I knew I'd been the victim of an editorial body snatcher again.

This post is inspired by Step 1 of The Snowflake Method: take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your novel; and by that creepy movie Sybil from 1976: the true story of a young woman named Sybil, whose childhood was so harrowing to her that she developed at least 13 different personalities.

One liner sentence attempts:

An unlikely relationship forms between a secret government agent and the target she’s been assigned to frame.

A ghost comes back to haunt a woman's double-crossing secret agent husband.

Someone is creating a death trap for a level one secret agent.

Gods and shapeshipfters and ghosty secret agents, oh my.

Double-crossing husband kills his wife, then learns she’s come back as Beetlejuice.

Twenty years of an asshole betrayer agent’s life is replayed through letters from his dead wife.

Sorry excuse of a man puts a bullet through his head at his dead wife’s urging.

None of these are my real idea, but I think one or two might not be bad. Ah, but if only I didn’t have to move on to Step 2: the introductory paragraph.

Send Advil.
5 Did the Unhingey Jiggy Engage in Unhingenosity
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