Oh yeah, I hate summarising things I'm close to. There's always the brute-force advertising-speak solution. If it helps, you can practice the following technique a couple of times on some of your favourite TV shows before trying it on "Knife".
"However, explaining that these fairies are in fact unimaginative, grimly pragmatic folk who have lost their magic and live in constant dread of the outside world, and that in a cage match with my crow-killing heroine a bit of fluff like Tink wouldn't last two minutes, is likely to tax my listener's patience, not to mention making me sound defensive."
So it's about xenophobic fairies.
Are they *aggressively* xenophobic fairies? Grimly paranoid fairies?
Two adjectives, one noun, is generaly a good rule for pithily summarising things, people and situations. Try doing that for three most important elements in your book.
Then stitch these descriptions together with suitable verbs, adverbs etc.: "meets", "while visiting", "during a time of", etc.
Finally append, "with hilarious results!". [N.B. this step is optional. =:o} ]
You'll probably hate the resulting description. Ignore that you hate it: Does it say the right things?
OK, now polish it until you love it. But without adding more than three extra words. =:o}
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Date: 2006-09-18 07:30 am (UTC)"However, explaining that these fairies are in fact unimaginative, grimly pragmatic folk who have lost their magic and live in constant dread of the outside world, and that in a cage match with my crow-killing heroine a bit of fluff like Tink wouldn't last two minutes, is likely to tax my listener's patience, not to mention making me sound defensive."
So it's about xenophobic fairies.
Are they *aggressively* xenophobic fairies? Grimly paranoid fairies?
Two adjectives, one noun, is generaly a good rule for pithily summarising things, people and situations. Try doing that for three most important elements in your book.
Then stitch these descriptions together with suitable verbs, adverbs etc.: "meets", "while visiting", "during a time of", etc.
Finally append, "with hilarious results!". [N.B. this step is optional. =:o} ]
You'll probably hate the resulting description. Ignore that you hate it: Does it say the right things?
OK, now polish it until you love it. But without adding more than three extra words. =:o}