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)? 

6 comments:

  1. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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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