The Synopsis Sweats

I know the feeling.

You sweated bullets and cried blood for how long getting that ms together? Your tortured brain finally performed all the necessary contortions to produce a query that is written for results. And now... you get to write a synopsis!! Hooray!!

Ok well... not so much with the hooray. I've written a few synops and I'm not going to tell you that I secretly enjoy it, or that it's not as hard as it sounds. 'Cause I don't, and 'cause it sucks.

Here's the bad news: If you take the route that Mindy-of-the-past (the unagented one) took, then you'll choose to send your query only to agents that don't request a synopsis. And while that might sound attractive, it also seriously limits your playing field. (Note - Mindy's agent does request a synop, good thing I got over my synopphobia).

Here's the good news: I have never heard of a writer getting signed because they wrote such a hot-damn-awesome synop that the agent snapped them up like a toad with a three legged cricket.

The purpose of a synopsis is to show the agent that you've got a plot arc, character development, and pacing all figured out - without them having to read every single word of an ms they're not sure they're sold on yet. The purpose of a synopsis is not to torture you or make you stab yourself in the eye with a carrot.

Tips on writing a synopsis? There's lots of advice out there, but just like writing a novel, you'll find that some of it will work for you, and some won't. So I'll tell you how I do it, and you can take it or leave it.

First - Make sure that your story is edited before you write a synop. And I mean edited with The Bloody Hatchet of Adverb Gore.

Second - Edit it again.

Third - Write your synop as if you were telling your story to a friend. Just write it - have a brain vomit that includes the salient points in your ms. If you hit a point where you think, "Hey, wait a sec... if I move on to the next plot-moving point, it skips like, 50 pages." Then you need to -

Fourth - Edit your ms.

Fifth - Hack away at that synop. Are you aiming for four pages, but you've got five? Should be fine - just kill some extraneous "that's" and re-check your phrasing for the cheapest word count you can get away with and still convey your idea. Are you aiming for two pages, but you've got four? Well, haul that axe back out and take a hard look at those sentences you're leaving in to illustrate how awesome you are, but don't necessarily show forward plot movement. It's called "Kill Your Synop Darlings," and it's a game with a high body count.

So now what? Ask your betas to look at it, especially those who have read the ms in question. You'd be surprised how many of them will have some insight on how to improve it. Beta readers are useful across the board - synopsis, query, novel. Use them wisely. Use them well.

And then? Put it in the envelope, attach it to the email, and send the sucker.

Then refer back to the good news.

An Extraneous "That" Execution

I'm going to say a dirty word.

As a librarian I'm accustomed to ignoring "a," "and," & "the." It's part of the Dewey rationale. As a writer, I'd love to add "that" to the list of words we just don't need.

Self-editing is not easy. If you haven't heard the phrase "kill your darlings" in connection to it, allow me to remedy the situation:

Kill

Your

Darlings

All those words your brain birthed onto the page during hours of torturous imagination-vomit will now be exposed to intense scrutiny under the harsh light of your red pen. Or at least, they should be. And guess what you gave birth to multiple times without even knowing, in groups of octuplets that then spawned on their own, creating a massive word count weight that will sink your ms into the depths? A nasty, four-letter word called THAT.

You don't need it. Some spur of the moment examples:

She thought that pink was a good color.

He knew that there was no way Sharon would go out with him.

Now check out these sentences:

She thought that pink was a good color.

He knew that there was no way Sharon would go out with him.

When I self-edited my first ms I kept a tally of my kills. I use it as a reference now when doing edits on other ms's, and it's proven priceless. How many extraneous "that's" did I execute on that first ms?

639

Yup. Literally a page and a half of useless words - without paragraph breaks or tabs. 639 pointless words clogging up my ms and showing any agent or editor exactly how inept I am at using the English language efficiently.

Arm yourself with red ink, exercise your delete key finger, and jump in with blood on your mind. That's the best way to hunt them down. They can be sneaky, your darlings.

The Necessity of Fresh Eyes

I'm giving in to the idea of self-sufficiency.

Yes, I know I can buy my own pickles cheaply. Yes, it does make my kitchen hot and steamy when I'm canning. Yes, sometimes things go wrong and shit explodes everywhere and you end up with welts. But I'm still very into the idea of making my own food, and its not because I want everything organic or that I'm afraid of chemicals and preservatives.

It's because I want to look smug when the end of civilization comes and I'm doing alright :)

If you want to learn more about my survival strategies, check out my video below from about survival... and black jelly beans.

Recently I decided it was time to expand from vegetables and canning into an herb garden. I had a nice spot picked out in the side yard and was waiting to borrow my mother's tiller to make the dream a reality, when ugly necessity reared its head.

I have a stone path following the fence around my pond. The area immediately to the left of the path has been a weedy, troublesome problem for three years, mostly because the rocks themselves sat there for a good long while and encouraged all kinds of weed growth and simultaneously discouraged mower blades.

So I got the tiller, and prioritized. The weeds were an eyesore, a shoulder-height testament to my inabilities as a lawn owner. The combined energies of my wrath, a mower and a Mantis took the smirk off their little green faces, but by then I had realized that I didn't have any grass seed and wouldn't have time to get any until the weeds had recouped and mounted their second assault. Meanwhile, my herbs were setting on the back porch, drooping dejectedly as they waited for their home away from Lowe's.

I got all pouty, drank some ice tea, and my mom came over to see how the herb garden was coming. I told her all my problems - the feisty weeds, the depressed herbs, the unbroken lawn waiting to become a garden, my lack of grass seed. She looked at me and said:

"So why don't you just put your herb garden in the ground you tilled up instead of grass?"

And the clouds parted, the Hallelujah Chorus played, and I saw all the advantages: I could harvest my herbs from my little stone path, I had much easier access to water than in the side yard, converting that ground to garden meant less mowing around the steeply sloped banks of the pond, and... (BONUS) it was already tilled, I wouldn't have to buy grass seed, and my herbs would be happy.

The only addition my mom had was, "Well, duh."

I needed mom's fresh eyes to alert me to the lack of common sense I was displaying, and sometimes we need that in writing too. As writers, we'll have our heart set on certain actions, dialogue, even events, that simply aren't what's best for the story itself in the big picture.

We need our beta readers and crit buddies to say to us, "Hey, why not try this?"

And, if they tack on, "Well, duh," try to remember you love them for a reason.