Another blog written in
Minnesota: Writing synopses are never fun. Well, at least not for me. Maybe
some anal plotter type enjoys them, but I find them torturous. While I was up
in Minnesota, working on my house, I spent some time trying to come up with a
five-page synopsis for my Work In Progress (WIP). I met with failure after
failure.
Multiple tries for me on a
synopsis is par for the course, but I was doing a particularly bad job with
this story. We're talking world champion horrible. Something clearly needed to
be done differently.
To get my head straight, I
started listing the plot points I felt needed to be mentioned in the synopsis,
and as I'm making this list, it dawned on me that I could do this for my hero's
growth arc—it's his book since he's doing the major changing—my heroine's
smaller growth arc, and the romance.
Four lists with the items all in
bullet points. Now all I had to do was blend them together into one cohesive
synopsis.
I started on that the same day I
finished the final list and it helped. A lot. I came in at six pages, not five,
but it's much more concise without a lot of unnecessary information thrown in. This
was one of my primary problems with the earlier versions—lots and lots of
extraneous detail.
This method actually proved
helpful. I'm probably going to try it again the next time I have to torture
myself by writing one.