Writing the Dreaded Synopsis

So there you sit, staring at the biggest achievement of your life so far - your completed manuscript - shoving hands full of Honey Cheerios into your mouth like a neanderthal (okay maybe that part is just me) and generally freaking out.

The time has come for you to write the synopsis of your book in a professional and unemotional way; never mind the months you've spent getting to know and love each character or the time you put into carving out the perfect plot over tens of thousands of words, none of that matters now, your carefully crafted prose is inconsequential at this point, you are now the most brutal surgeon and your job is to hack away at your baby and condense everything into two pages that will make someone think okay, yeah I definitely want to read this book.

I know, I thought it was impossible too and I spent a week in tears trying to figure out how it was done, reading every article I could find on how to do it and listening to YouTuber's that I don't even like in the hopes that someone somewhere would be able to explain the process to me.

As promised in my first post Lets Get This Out of The Way I am bringing you all along on my journey to get published as a debut author and this is definitely a big part of it. All the agents and publishers insist upon a brilliant synopsis before they will even take a gander at your work, there is no getting around it and I'm not going to lie to you, it isn't easy to do. The reason for this is that you are too close to the story to look at it through a neutral lens and if I weren't broke, I would pay a professional to read my book and write the synopsis for me.

But I am broke so I had to do it myself and this is how I went about it:

1: INTRODUCE THE MAIN CHARACTER
(all the advice says that the first time you write a character's name, it needs to be capitalized).

I have two main characters so my introduction was as follows:

The Chronicles of Jackal and Rabbit is one story told from the perspective of two characters; JACKAL, a cold assassin who’s bored with life and RABBIT, a lonely artist with a dark past.

Its succinct and to the point, WHO is the character and WHAT is significant about them?

To my delight, when I had this brief description nailed down I began to find it easier to write about my story, I approached it like I would if I were explaining a movie to my husband that he hadn't seen; you cant describe it all in detail from memory but you can...

... 2: GET THE GIST OF THE PLOT DOWN.

Here is the key to explaining everything quickly; forget about the "how."
It doesn't matter how the bad guy got the listening device into the safe house, the point is he did and now he knows our hero's plan. 

My advice is to write it badly the first time with lots of "and then's" - like a child explaining his day - and then polish it up after, once you've spent two pages or so explaining the plot beginning to end (yes, give away all the spoilers like an asshole) you want to reread it and insert the relevant character arcs; in what way does your character grow and change over the course of the book? (I'm going to go ahead and count that as No.3)

And just like that you have a synopsis that you can work on and make perfect. Don't expect to get everything down in two pages first time, make it long and cut it back until you have something that is tight and polished and remember to let your emotions take a back seat on this task.

My next adventure is going to be figuring out how to write a query letter to a publisher now that my synopsis is finished, stay tuned for more frantic posts on how to be a writer, basically, by Meg Smith. - the painter.