Over the past three months, I’ve been learning and understanding what my book is about. I started writing with a story in mind, a beginning, middle, and end. I had themes I wanted to emphasize, characters I wanted to present, emotions I wanted to share. But I was unable to provide a succinct summary of the work as a whole, like what you might read on the inside cover flap of a hardbound book, or at the top of an Amazon page.
I first tried writing one the end of December, when I sent it off to the agent who gave a talk at the Bainbridge writers’ group. This past week, I revised it a few more times, after working through the excisions and revisions suggested in the editorial assessment I commissioned. I’ve learned what the core of the book is, the lodestar which all of its content must be tested against. Throwing away almost all of “Book Two”, many of the poems, much of the fluff related to Mike’s life, and then emphasizing several key points in the Janie/Mike relationship, I’ve arrived at the following. Ninety-two words, three sentences, takes 30 seconds to say:
“When her fantasies about a boy in French class turn real, 16 y/o Janie Stein must discover if she can balance love’s passionate pull with her family’s expectations of their valedictorian daughter when she enters Radcliffe College. The social and cultural turmoil of America in the late ’60’s adds to her dilemma as she and Michael Harrison navigate their path of deepening love. 15 years later, her diary from that time re-appears, and, guided by that fading signpost from the past, she recreates the story of those five years.”