What’s Your Book About?

 

If you’re an author, you’ve found yourself in this situation a hundred times. You’re at a party, talking to a fellow author, at a workshop or seminar, or just shooting the bull with a friend or relative when, invariably, this unassuming question rears its ugly head—“What’s Your Book About?”

It seems mundane enough. They’re asking you what your book is about. Shouldn’t you know? After all, you wrote the damn thing. It’s not like you didn’t spends months and months writing, and editing, and formatting, and promoting and marketing. But, invariably, you freeze. You stand there flatfooted and begin blabbering on with no rhyme or reason. You stumble about and give a different answer every time someone asks you this simple question. You know you’re in trouble if your inquirer asks you the magical question and you say, “Uh, well, it’s about…” Don’t worry, you’re not stupid (although I don’t really know you personally). The problem is, you know what your book is about; you just can’t convey it in one concise statement.

If you’re a New York Times best-selling author and you’re signing books for an adoring fan you can always answer as follows, “read the book and find out” (asshole).

Well, have no fear. I’m here to help. You don’t need to invent the wheel every time some inquisitive person ask you about your book. You don’t need to write a book every time some non-caring bozo asks you one modest little question. You just need one simple line. You need a premise line.

            Yes, that’s right, a premise line—a one-sentence book description, a hook, an elevator pitch, a TV Guide pitch—hell, any way to let your fellow writers or your readers or your inquisitive cousin know that you know what your own book is about.

            Let’s say someone (who’s been living on the planet Mars for the past thirty years) approached me and asked me what the movie Jaws was about (a movie I’ve only seen about 15 times and read in book form about 3 more).

After a giving them a shocked look I would answer incredulously. “You’ve never seen Jaws?”

“No,” they would say. “I don’t watch many movies.”

I would then roll my eyes, take a breath and begin, “Well, there’s this big great white shark and he’s eating people around this coastal resort—a resort called Amity—and the Sheriff is trying to close the beaches and the mayor doesn’t want him to and the Sheriff and the city hire this guy named Quint to kill it this shark but in the end it eats him instead. Quint that is. You know, it was Spielberg’s first movie,” I would add. You think he got the idea?

            Well, yeah, I know, this is a movie but a good premise line works the same for a movie as it does for a book.

            I’ve written both non-fiction and fiction books but my first work of fiction—the first in a series of three books—is entitled Book of Samuel. Fear of having to describe my book in concise fashion no longer grips me. As soon as I realized that I could stop jockeying from one leg to the other and stammering about every time someone asked me the dreaded, “What is Your Book About” question if I came up with a premise line. It goes like this:

·         After attending a family wedding, an obstetrician, his wife and his parents miss their return flight to Pittsburgh, finding themselves left alone to confront one another with two explosive family issues during their eight-hour layover in the Savannah airport.

Will I spew this out word for word every time someone puts me on the spot? Of course not. But it sums everything up rather well. And it sounds good if I do say so myself. Especially when you consider that I used to answer the question with something like this, “Well, there’s this family who misses their flight and starts fighting with one another and…” And at least I have some parameters to go by, some organized words put together that I can draw from when the time comes.

 

  Now, let’s try that Jaws thing again.

·         When a great white shark starts attacking beachgoers in a coastal town during high tourist season, a water-phobic Sheriff must assemble a team to hunt it down before it kills again.

 

Yeah, water-phobic Sheriff. That’s what I meant to say.

 

Thanks to Alexandra Sokoloff’s, Screenwriting Tricks For Authors (And Screenwriters)

 

JJR