Novel Update (February) + why do I have so much trouble describing what my novel is about?

I wrote the last line of a brand new novel three weeks ago.

Unlike the first novel I wrote, I’m being very strict with my planning process for this one, doing all I can to control against falling into another monolithic editing process. So, I’m putting it away till March. When I come back to it, I’ve got a very specific plan that I’ll be following to carry this thing to pitching standard. More on that later.

I’m devoting the month of February to completing structural edits on my first novel, Echoes from the Trapdoor: the one that has been stuck in a monolithic editing process for a while now.

But this is the last of it.

I’ve done all the thinking I’m going to do about how to market this thing to agents, so after I’ve tweaked all the bits I need to in order to make the structure reflect that. I’m done with it. It will sell or it won’t sell.

So what is this new marketing angle?

And why has it taken me so long to get to this point?

Since I began telling people I’ve written a novel, I’ve always struggled with the most basic question:

What is it about?

There are outside factors that make this question more difficult than it needs to be as it tends to come up in a group setting with people you either don’t know very well or are meeting for the first time (i.e. I usually spend half my answer dwelling on trying to be concise, trying not to sound too pretentious, trying to make the plot sound entertaining to people who might not necessarily be big readers— describing what your novel is about is describing what type of person you are in some ways so it’s important to get it right) but a big part of my trouble was simply pinning down which detail to focus on.

If we’ve got three hours to dig into the ins and outs, I’ll have no problem laying it out for you. Grab a beer, take a seat and I’ll chew your ear off.

But if there’s limited time and I don’t want people’s eyes to glaze over, I’m forced to give the abridged version. But this is easier said than done.

Here are a few angles I’ve gone down that seemed like the logical way to simplify my plot at first, but each of which failed for their own reasons.

The “Genre” angle.

At it’s most basic level, this is a dystopian novel outlining the fall of a nation.

But the “dystopia” genre invokes young adult fiction for most people. Hunger Games, Insurgent etc.¹

If not that, they might have visions of apocalyptic type stories in their heads, The Road, Mad Max, I am Legend. All of which aren’t wildly outside of what I’m writing, but they are also quite far off the mark.

So I try not to dance around the word dystopia where I can.