Monday, September 19, 2011

Synopsis Monday

It's Monday, which is bad enough, but I'm also working furiously on some series synopses for a couple of backlist series that we're sending to digital publishers to be published as ebooks. One is a Western series, which is difficult to sell these days but which did quite well in the 80s and 90s; I think we'll see them have new life as ebooks. The synopsis is hard to write, though!

Anyone out there working on synopses? Do you hate them? Love them (crazies)? 

Posted by Meredith Barnes at 1:22 PM
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6 comments:

  1. Jonathan DalarSeptember 19, 2011 at 1:26 PM

    Hate 'em with a purple passion deep in the bottom of my soul.

    That being said, they're a necessary evil, and can really showcase your ability as a writer to trim back everything but the core of the story.

    Writing them is like working out. No pain, no gain.

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  2. Giles HashSeptember 19, 2011 at 1:27 PM

    Synopses are so much work. My least favorite part of writing. I understand the importance, but it's no fun.

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  3. AnonymousSeptember 19, 2011 at 1:30 PM

    I recently wrote three synopses for my superlong Russian historical novel. One is very long and detailed all the plots, characters, and subplots, one is medium-length, and the shortest one measures in at 7 pages. (When you've written a book that's just a bit shorter than Anna Karenina, you can't very well write a synopsis of only a few pages!)

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  4. Margaret YangSeptember 19, 2011 at 2:59 PM

    Synopses are easy! When I teach syonpsis writing, I use The Wizard of Oz as my example because that's a story everyone knows. You can find my synopsis lesson here.

    http://www.help4writers.com/blog/?p=374

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  5. AnonymousSeptember 19, 2011 at 5:22 PM

    I hate trying to cram 65k plus words into a two to three page document. Doing it effectively is even more challenging. But it's a necessary evil, like paying bills ;)

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  6. AnonymousSeptember 19, 2011 at 10:43 PM

    When I tried to get my story into a one-page document, I wanted to throw something at the computer screen. But when I read that most will accept two pages, I calmed down. I don't think my synopsis would win awards, but it's, you know, coherent.

    I love Chuck Sambuchino's examples of synopses on his site. http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/synopsis-writing

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