I think I’m going to synopsize the theater book.
wrote a synopsis, which reminded me of John Braine’s How to Write a Novel. I’ve only read the first chapter, but that’s the one in which he lays out his writing process: no planning, first draft as quick as possible, write a summary, rewrite the summary until it’s right, then write a perfect second draft.
That’s how I meant to do the theater book, except I failed at the last step and am doing a lot of rewriting and revising. My summary was very short, only a paragraph, and didn’t really account for all the changes between drafts 0 and 1 (or 1 and 2, if you prefer). I changed the setting, many secondary characters, and several subplots. I also had to figure out why these events were happening in this place at this time to these people.
(Not that I’m saying I’d have succeeded in writing a draft with no revision needed if I’d written a better summary.)
But, since I have changed so much, my outline is very skimpy, and I’m not really sure what happens in the next chunk of the book. Maybe if I do a longish synopsis I’ll get a better idea of the options.