Climbing into Bed with Strangers

The other day over on Facebook, I was involved in a brief discussion with an author who, as part of a novel proposal package, was writing her synopsis before working on the sample chapters.

Yikes, I responded, though I've done it myself upon occasion. To me that always feels as if I'm climbing into bed with strangers. I like moseying through my opening chapters first: a snippet here, a deletion there, a rewrite coming from another angle. It's how I get to know the characters so I'm comfortable enough with predicting what they'll do to put together an outline of their journey in the synopsis. In the opening pages, the story's themes and tone gradually reveal themselves to me as well.

It's not the way I always write, and as I've previously discussed on the blog, I rely on an ever-evolving number of prewriting strategies to focus my energies on the characters and their relationships. None of these methods, or anyone's methods (including starting off with a synopsis) is the perfect, inviolable, correct way, any more than any one of them is wrong.

Instead, it's all about making the process work for you, in the service of fleshing out the most compelling characters and the most engaging story possible.

So how do you get to know your characters? Or do you prefer "jumping into bed with strangers" and letting all the arms and legs sort themselves out? ;)