Writing a Series: Plot

I'm going to call the posts this week: How a Pantser Writes A Series Proposal And Somehow Sells It Without Having Any Idea What She's Doing.

Ready?

I've said before, but it's worth repeating, I don't plot out a book from beginning to end, chapter by chapter, before I start. Actually, I should say that I did it one time – for IT'S HOTTER IN HAWAII – and it was the hardest book I've ever written. Like, the book made me go back and forth between wanting to cry and wanting to throw my laptop out the window.

I'm one of those folks who if I write a super detailed synopsis for a book then in my mind the book is done and there's nothing left to write. Instead of all that super pre-plotting, I need to think about the book, take some notes and, frankly, start writing. I revise the book every single day as I write. In fact, for most of the book, I start each day by reading from page 1 – not kidding – to where I stopped writing the night before. That means, by the time I finish the book, it has been polished and revised about a billion times. It's a convoluted process but when I tried to change it (the IT'S HOTTER IN HAWAII plotting disaster), I was miserable and every writing day was painful.

Knowing I'm not good at pre-plotting a book, imagine my panic when my Intrigue editor asked me to do a proposal for a four-book miniseries. That meant having a plan and writing four synopses. It also meant having some idea what was going to happen in the series. I actually had no idea what was going to happen which will become obvious in a second.

The first book in the Mystery Men miniseries (not counting UNDER THE GUN which introduced the Recovery Project group) is GUNS AND THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. The miniseries is about a conspiracy within WitSec, witness protection, where a group of powerful people are selling out the whereabouts of witness protection participants for big money. The conspiracy is set up in GUNS AND THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, but you'd never know that from the original synopsis I wrote:

Holden Price is bored with hanging out in secluded cabin waiting for a call to come that tells him to get back to work at the Recovery Project. Until a beautiful blonde drives a car right until his living room. Worse, Mia Landers insists that destroying his house is not her only crime. She knows she hit someone. Not just any someone, a controversial congressman. But there isn't a body and Mia can't seem to remember exactly what happened or what made her use Holden's house as a parking lot.

Holden finds blood on the front of Mia's car. He also finds Mia's desire to do the right thing compelling. Since she refuses to believe she fell asleep at the wheel, Holden calls on his old Recovery Project team to help him check the story out. It will give them all an opportunity to use their skills and stay fresh, especially since the police aren't interested in what they think is simple accident. When the congressman shows up on television very much alive two days later, Holden wonders if the woman he finds so attractive is really little crazy. Then her apartment catches a fire and her car disappears. And the supposedly legitimate men who come to Holden's house to review the crime scene don't appear to exist when Holden goes digging in their backgrounds.

Clearly someone is going to great lengths to wipe out any evidence of the accident and the congressman is changing his votes on major legislation. It's up to Holden and Mia to unravel the clues about the accident that never happened without becoming victims or losing each other.

Let's just go with the obvious problems:

1. This synopsis is super short and says NOTHING about the plot of the book.

2. WitSec isn't even mentioned here. Know why? Because I had no idea the miniseries was about a conspriacy in WitSec until I started writing this book.

Can you tell the one thing I knew about this book before I started writing? The opening scene. Mia does drive her car right through the front door of Holden's cabin. That much I knew. That opening scene was in my head. What happened next? Yeah, I had no clue until I started writing.

But it gets worse. Here's a paragraph from my proposal for Book #2, which became GUNNING FOR TROUBLE:

A Homeland Security official asks a favor of the Project team. This one is private, but the official's promise of putting in a good word for the reestablishment of the group is hard to ignore. He wants the group to check into rumors of wrongdoing by one of Homeland's top administrators. A child is missing. His mother had always insisted the child was kidnapped as part of a government conspiracy. The mother is now dead, which raises even more questions about what happened to the child. The group agrees to help with Adam Wright leading the covert investigation.

Obvious problems here:

1. Adam is not the hero in this book. Caleb is. Clearly I changed that before I started.

2. Again, do you see any mention of WitSec? Nope.

3. This paragraph has absolutely nothing to do with what happens in the book, which is a former-lovers-must-work-together hook. I ditched this plot once I knew the miniseries was about a conspiracy in WitSec.

At this point I will admit I can't even find the original proposed synopsis for Book #3, which became LOCKED AND LOADED. I have no idea why there's a blank in the proposal copy I have saved. I figure I filled in something before submitting it to my editor, but I have no idea what I said. I do know I didn't use whatever was originally on there since LOCKED AND LOADED follows Adam and a woman in WitSec whose identity has been compromised. I know the proposal didn't say that because Caleb was the original hero here and I switched that after selling the proposal. Also, when I finally did decide to write about a WitSec conspiracy, I wrote the entire Book #1 (GUNS AND THE GIRL NEXT DOOR) saying all of the participants who had been compromised were now dead. It wasn't until I finished the book and was about to turn it in that I realized I wanted at least one alive and had to go back and revise. So, poor Maddie (the LOCKED AND LOADED heroine) wasn't even alive when I wrote the original proposal. Poor Maddie.

And Book #4. Wow. I can't even show you the proposal because I'd give too much away of THE BIG GUNS. Note: the book comes out in about a week, so you don't have to wait long to read it. What I describe as the plot in the proposal ended up being one scene near the end of the book. At least I got the hero right. It was always Zach.

There you have it. The awful truth – I stink at writing proposals. The good news is that I think the books I actually wrote were much better than the ones I proposed. The even better news is my editor didn't scream when I turned in each book and they didn't resemble what she was expecting one bit. Or if she did scream, she did it quietly, because I never heard it.

Next up: How the heroines changed from proposal to books.