Ever prayed for a synopsis?

For a week or two now, off and on, I've been wrestling with a synopsis--a six-page summary of a novel, written in present tense, for my agent to use in selling the book. Sounds easy enough, except I was also revising the whole manuscript, so the synopsis kept changing. Once the plot finally stopped changing, you'd think it wouldn't be hard to wrap up the synopsis.

Wrong. Even after the plot was solid in my chapter outlines and in my head, the synopsis stank. It was too detailed, too busy, too confusing. It was bad.

But yesterday after church, my friend Jerry walked up to me and said he wanted to pray for me and my writing. I wasn't going to argue with that. So Jerry prayed, briefly. I went home and didn't even look at the danged synopsis. But I woke up this morning knowing how to start the thing in a different vein. Same plot, just a different way of tackling it. By 10:30 this morning, when I was scheduled to have a phone conference with one of my critique partners, I had a brand-new synopsis to e-mail to her, and she loved it. (She's so sweet. She hadn't wanted to tell me the old version of the synopsis smelled to high heaven, so she said it much more tactfully than that.)

So, there you have it. Prayer works wonders. Even on a stinky synopsis. Thank You, Lord. And thanks, Jerry, for praying.