Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Book 1.5

Right now I’m working on a synopsis for a novella that might come between In the After and Book 2. Its purpose is to fill in back story for a few of the characters and it’s really fun to bring these background scenes front and center.

The trouble I’m having is getting all the information into a 3-5 page synopsis. Right now, it’s running 7 pages, and I’m not sure which info to cut out…of course I think it’s all dreadfully important and pertinent. J My agent has it now and is going to help me refine it a bit, before we send it off to Harper for approval.

How about you guys? Do you have trouble with synopsis, or are you a summarizing ninja?

I'm going to try and sort out my summary this weekend, so I'll be back Monday!
 
 

5 comments:

  1. Some people say that synopses are harder to write than the book itself. I revised my query letter and synopsis for a month, with lots of feedback from beta readers, before I felt they were ready to send out. It really is kind of an art, and I do think I'm pretty good at it--at least for the first book I wrote.

    The best trick I found is that not everything has to be explained chronologically, if it can be better explained earlier in the synopsis. And not every event has to be described or *completely* faithful to the actual book; it really does have to be as interesting, cohesive, and well-written as the book so it kind of works like a story on its own.

    Good luck!

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  2. I do much better with short summaries than longer ones--I always trip over how much detail to include, which characters to leave out, that kind of thing. In a short summary, I intuit better what to cut out!

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  3. Synopses make my brain hurt. I want to put all the things in them, and end up with far too much! Good luck with yours.

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  4. i have a hard enough time trying to keep my query tight, I'm afraid of what my finished synopsis will look like.

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  5. I decided early on not to go in for traditional publishing or an agent, so the synopsis hasn't been on my radar, though I did write one early on in the process. It was a bedevilling process.

    Interesting about using a novella format to play around with characters. I'm planning on doing that with a character I co-write, and possibly with my solo writing, with supporting characters or villains.

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