The dreaded synopsis. It’s a crucial piece of the agent querying package and something I delayed until I couldn’t anymore. On a recent call with an old critique partner, he lamented a similar aversion, i.e., putting it off until he needed the synopsis for querying. After we both managed to tackle this seemingly herculean task, we admitted to each other how useful it would have been to do it sooner, how it revealed aspects of our stories we’d never realized.
Getting the entire story written out highlights story issues and plot holes. It can illuminate where character arcs aren’t progressing or elements in your mind that didn’t make it onto the page. As I wrote the synopsis, one sentence after another, the cracks formed in my story. I understood how informative the whole process is from a structural standpoint. Incorporating this earlier in the writing process would be much more helpful.
What the heck?
Agents often ask for a book synopsis as part of a query package, which differs significantly from the query letter. It doesn’t read as a back cover, and it usually isn’t in first person (even if the book is), but in third, and it’s not meant to have a voice. Perhaps others will argue against this, and every rule has exceptions, but generally, it’s suggested to keep the synopsis informative. It doesn’t hold back. It tells all the secrets, twists, and character reveals. It’s the whole book, as best as you can format it into one page. Sometimes, three, but many agents ask for a one-page synopsis. One Page.
I know the question many authors ask, including myself: How the HELL am I going to get my entire book into a page? I just got done writing a query letter; that was hard enough. I’m tired, and I just want people to enjoy my book. Please, for the love of all things holy. Yep, I’ve been there. I feel you. And once you pick yourself back up with new strength to soldier on, there is a path forward.
In conversations with other authors and researching online, synopsis methods tend to veer into two methods:
1) Build the synopsis from the ground up. Do it in one sentence. Then expand to a paragraph, then three, and then you’re basically at a page.
2) Read through the entire book and write down everything that happens. Once you’re done, whittle it down to ten pages, three pages, and one page.
Both methods have merits, but I still struggled to write a synopsis through multiple attempts.
Synopsis method I
From the outside, this method seems more straightforward: start with a sentence, then go from there. But as my fingers hovered over the keyboard, my mind sputtered. How do you possibly condense an entire book into one sentence? Many articles use well-known books/movies as examples of how to craft a single sentence. They make it seem SO easy. Maybe for others, it is. But I struggled. Eventually, after much trial and error, I got a sentence that worked.
Here’s what I got after many attempts:
The Heart of the Valley tells the story of amateur archeologist Freya Lark’s misadventures on an expedition for artifacts of historic significance only to learn the bones she unearths contain a unknown magic whose discovery may just release the sands of a content consuming desert if the knowledge gets out.
It’s not the best, I admit it. And this was after a ton of work. Eventually, I got about half a page of story. And this is where I petered out. One of the main issues was not knowing what to include in the synopsis and what to leave out. The crucial part is conveying the main character’s arc and the A-story. However, if you’re like me, there are elements of the B-plot, side characters/events that, when removed, feel like taking out blocks from a stack of Jenga. Which ones do you remove to keep the tower standing? To keep the vision and feel of the story intact?
For this reason, I eventually moved on to the second method.
Synopsis method II
While going scene by scene, chapter by chapter, seems like a slog (and it is), there’s a method to the madness of doing the synopsis this way. First, it removes the limitations of space. You’re not concerned with getting it to a page; your only concern is getting the whole story. Easy enough. Second, by writing it all out, the scenes and characters that are not crucial to the main story start to fall away. Knowing you can only introduce a limited number of the cast, these characters reveal themselves through the process.
Also, cataloging the story in such depth makes many elements that aren’t working obvious. I’ve written/edited this novel for years, and I still found areas that, when I got scene by scene, felt like they should have been caught drafts ago.
The caution with this method is that it takes time. If you’re on a deadline, like getting ready for a convention or querying, you want to leave enough time and not slam it into a week (like I tried). Once the whole story is on paper, it’s super fresh in your mind, and the areas that are unimportant and don’t need to be included are trimmed away. Then it gets harder the more you cut. Like the threads in a carpet, once one is removed, there are other elements you will need to remove for the whole synopsis to make sense. You can’t introduce some characters without explaining why, so that entire subplot needs to go. And so on.
It’s still not easy to make those cuts, so it took a while to whittle it down.
Secret method III
So I lied. There is a secret third method. Really, it’s because I ran out of time to whittle down the twenty-page synopsis. However, with the entire book summarized, the plot crystallized in my mind and the one-page flowed easily. I started by following the main character, setting up her goals and motivations and then running these through the plot, only introducing other characters when they intersected with this main plot. All I focused on was the core parts of the plot, ensuring each followed the one before to make it as straightforward as possible why it was happening.
After this was all done, I went through and tried to highlight (briefly) how the choices and events affected the main character, how these added to her emotional journey, what the revelation was at the end of the book, and how it connected to her deeper change.
By the time I finished this, it was about a page and a half, which was much easier to edit to a page. So in the end, I did a hybrid of the two methods. But writing the whole story onto paper was crucial to getting to that one page.
Synopsis as a drafting tool
The revelation from this whole exercise is how helpful the synopsis is for stress testing the story of your novel. It not only puts the plot and events under a microscope but can also reveal how character arcs aren’t working as intended, or isolates which scenes truly move the plot forward, or where additional information is needed to help them land.
Even though I used to dread the synopsis, I now plan on writing the twenty-page version after the first draft. Getting the book into a readable format will illuminate needed structural edits for a second draft and highlight which character elements aren’t landing.
Then, after I finish the second draft, I’ll update the synopsis and read it again to see what’s working and what isn’t. In this way, the synopsis acts like a working outline to drive revisions. And the bonus to this method is that you already have the document to whittle down into the synopsis. In this way, adding it into the toolbox earlier will hopefully help with revisions and ensure I don’t have to start this whole process from scratch at the end when my will for a project is waning.
How about everyone else? Did anyone else struggle with the synopsis as much as I did? Did other methods work better? I want to know. Tell me your success story.