Guest blogger, Carole Gift Page, continues to share her Ten Steps in Writing a Novel.
Step 2 (Con’t.) Let’s compare the synopsis in the last post with the opening of the actual novel itself:
Going home.
Two days on the road now.
Justin Cahill was traveling east on Interstate 90 with his wife Robyn and their son Eric, heading for America’s heartland in their silver-blue Toyota Corolla. It was mid-December. Nearly Christmas.
Heat, dry and oppressive, belched from the dashboard heater, parching Justin’s throat. Too much heat, giving off a hot electric smell, repugnant, a stark, ironic contrast to the icy swirls on the windshield, belying the bitter, bone-numbing cold outside, the endless stretches of barren, ice-swept landscape.
“Going home.” The phrase summoned images of familiar, aging faces, comfortable old rooms, crackling fires, child voices singing, “Over the river and through the woods . . .” Long dormant feelings blended with faint, moldering sensations—tricks of the mind. Memories sprang from shadowed crevices, from nowhere, sharp and surreal, with a stinging, swift reality, and then rebounded with the sudden snap of a slingshot.
Going home.
The radio blared, static-scratchy, not quite tuned in.
Willie Nelson was singing, his voice low and gravelly, throbbing with a husky passion . . .
See the difference between the synopsis and the novel itself? While the synopsis summarizes or tells, the novel shows, immediately drawing the reader into an actual scene filled with lots of sensory details and description.