Synopsis Again

Last week, I was having a brief discussion about that most hated thing... The Synopsis. Or "How in the hell to boil 100K words into 2-pages?"

There's been a lot of discussion around the web about this issue, since it seems to be the bane of a writer's existence. With this discussion there seems to be many conflicting opinions on how in-depth one should be, how snazzy one should make it, what should-could-can be left out of one.

My understanding after boiling all this down is that a synopsis should generally be no more than two pages. Hit the high points. Who is your main character? What is the problem he faces? Who is the antagonist? How does the problem get resolved? In other words, a blurb with more detail. (And please understand, I haven't sold a page yet, so my understanding could be way off the mark.)

When I first started working on a synopsis, I took my outline (and we'll talk about that another time) and I put each bullet point into a sentence, creating a paragraph for each scene. I ended up with a 5 page synopsis that read like a litany of separate incidents. In other words, it blew chunks. But since I didn't know any better, that was the synopsis that got sent out whenever an agent asked for a synopsis to be included in a query packet.

I think that synopsis did more to torpedo my work than it ever helped. Looking back on that thing, I wouldn't have asked for pages if I was faced with a massive boring thing like that.

So I did some more research. I found a couple sites that gave very good information (See Mastering the Dreaded Synopsis - Condensing Your Novel for one of the best, IMO.) And I took that information to re-write the synopsis for Caldera. My first stab at the synopsis wasn't anywhere near as horrible as the very first one I wrote for Spectacle, but it was still fairly rancid. My last stab was much better. (I think... I hope.)

I read an agent's blog recently (Sorry, I forget who) where they said they hate reading synopses as much as we hate writing them, but they are a necessary evil. It's the only way for an agent to see that you can, in fact, write all the necessary components of a story (i.e. beginning, middle, end) without having to read the whole story. Think about it from their standpoint: When your time is split between your myriad of clients plus the work necessary to sell their books, AND the 100-200 queries you get every week, AND the partials you request and the fulls you request, AND keeping up with the industry news, etc., you really don't have time to get halfway through a book only to find out the writer wrote well at the beginning, but he didn't have a clue about how to wrap the story up and everything fell flat. All that time wasted. Synopses cut that time considerably. So, hated or not, they're vital to the job.

I don't have all the answers. Like you, I am doing the best I can to create the best query packet possible. After all the time I spent writing my books, it seems silly not to spend a large amount of time perfectly my queries for them.

Any thoughts? How is your synopsis writing coming along? And if you've got any hints for those people who are still floundering, comment away. Any help will be greatly appreciated.