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.