Tuesday, September 7, 2010

That Damn Synopsis

Natalie Murphy over at The Sound of Rain wrote a deservedly angry gripe on the evils of the query letter.  Now, I've been putting off my own query writing for a while now, and by gum, it's time to man up.  But then I started thinking about how a query is an entire book condensed to one page, which ought to be impossible, and compared it to a synopsis, which is an entire book condensed to several, or more, pages.

Well, that ought to be easier.

Except, having already attempted it a few times, I know it is not easier.  However, I thought, if I can write a successful synopsis, I should, logically, then further be able to synopsize the synopsis and turn it into a query.  And then, a friend asked me to look over his synopsis, which still needed some work, so I let the Google machine guide me to a few synopsis writing sites.

Of course, there is Absolute Write, which is invaluable, but I also came across a few others.

This first one  is a bit bare bones and lists basically what goes into a synopsis and not much more.

This next one gets to the heart of the synopsis a bit more, describing not just what to write, but how.

At any rate, that's  the first few results from the Google.  I imagine there are better ones, but I'm not of a mind to research them for the sake of this post.

So, a-synopsizing I will go.  If you have some advice, toss it my way.  I've got a butterfly net handy.

6 comments:

erica m. chapman said...

Nice list, dude. I have no idea how to do it. I haven't gotten that far. Sorry. I hope others are more wise than I. Who am I kidding... LOL

Good luck!

Natalie Murphy said...

Great list! Thanks for the links!

Cheyanne said...

This post by Hannah taught me all I needed and helped make my synopsis brilliant: http://hannahmosk.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-book-becomes-book-writing-synopsis.html

Good luck!

Angela Ackerman said...

This is great--I need to write one soon. This might keep me from crying too badly.


Angela @ The Bookshelf Muse

Melissa Hurst said...

Sorry, I don't have any advice for the evil synopsis. I don't have a clue how to write one. Not looking forward to it either. *shudders*

Thanks for the links. I need all the help I can get:)

jkraus8464 said...

OK now get busy on the synopsis.