WRITING A SYNOPSIS

One of the most common causes of failure for first-time writers, is thinking that you know the entire book and that it’s in your head. Why waste time writing a synopsis?

So you sit down in front of a computer screen with the plot running rampant through your mind, and then you begin to write.

But after ten or fifteen thousand words - about three or so chapters - you’ve come to the end of the story. You’ve said everything you wanted to say. It’s all there on the screen, staring back at you, daring you to change a single syllable of your breathless prose.

IF YOU DON’T WRITE A SYNOPSIS OF THE NOVEL BEFORE YOU CREATE THE FIRST SENTENCE, THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU

But of course, no publisher will look at a novel that short - it’s not even long enough for a novella.

So why does this happen to so many beginning writers? Simply because for a story to work, to gain complexity in the telling which will make it satisfying to readers, the book has to be planned.

And planned meticulously.

You need to write a synopsis of how the story begins, how it develops, and how it ends. You need to flesh out your characters, create amazing sub-plots which will support and enhance the dominant storyline, and introduce a couple of red-herrings which readers will find tantalising.

All of this has to be done before you write a single word of the story.

Big job? And what’s the point? Why not just sit down to write the book, which has been dancing around your brain for months and months, just waiting for you to have time to write it down? You know what’s going to happen, you know what your characters are going to say, and so why waste time on a synopsis?

Simply because if you don’t write a synopsis, you’ll just have a skeleton of a book of about….you guessed it….fifteen thousand words. A synopsis ensures that the ideas and themes of the book are all there to give it flesh.

SO WHAT’S A SYNOPSIS?

How long should a synopsis be? Not more than two pages. Yes…just a couple of pages of the most concentrated, densest bullet-point writing you can manage. Leave the long elegant sentences to the story itself. This synopsis is nothing more than an aide-memoire for yourself. It’s not going to be shown to publishers or critics so its sole purpose is to keep you on track.

A SYNOPSIS ISN’T A BOOK. IT SHOULDN’T BE MORE THAN TWO PAGES OF BULLET-POINTS

If it’s more than a couple of pages, it means that you’re writing your book, and not your ideas. That’s why you should do it in the shorthand of bullet-points. Each line you write of the synopsis could translate into an entire chapter in your book.

So why am I suggesting that you should write bullet-points and not expand the synopsis so that you know what you’re doing when you come to write the book? Simply because books have a dynamism of their own, and once you start to write, the thoughts which will begin to flood down from your brain to your fingers and onto the page, might very well take you into amazing new directions you hadn’t previously thought of. Books often grow in the writing.

The point of a synopsis is that when you come to the end of a wonderful piece of writing, you can look at the synopsis, and remind yourself of where your story should be going next. It helps to keep your book in order; otherwise, you could forget important plot twists or aspects of the history of the characters.

And remember that the synopsis isn’t set in stone. If you’ve found a new direction, or character, or sub-plot which enlivens the book while you’re writing it, then change the synopsis. But make sure that if you do, you rewrite it in light of your new direction, so that all of the other important character or plot issues which happen later are still relevant.