Finished through scene 20 last night — have done 21 and am starting on 22 right now. These are rough two-to-three-sentence outlines that just hit on how each scene expresses that scene’s conflict and how it ties in to the major theme (or secondary theme). It is, from experience, not something you can show to an agent and say — “This is the book.” The agent says, “I don’t know what to make of this. It doesn’t make any sense. I can’t piece a story together from this.” I’m assuming it’s not something editors would get, either. But this is the actual thing I use to write the book. It is the eggs and flour and sugar still in the containers, before you turn them into cake. But for me it works.
The pretty synopsis and outline and the rest of the stuff — that’s all just for show.