Bringing sanity to the dreaded synopsis

I post often about writing contests and conferences, sometimes mentioning, as if an afterthought, that these may require a synopsis of our work. But how long has it been since I actually posted about the writing of the synopsis itself? After attending this month’s synopsis critique session from the Dallas Mystery Writers group, I found that writers are struggling with the same problems that bedeviled me at the time of that last post – in 2013!

So, here’s an updated version of that post now, with interjections from the recent synopsis critiques.

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My personal experience was that, after attending at least numerous panels and any number of blogs in which agents all but swore on their grandmothers’ graves that synopses were a waste of time, I had never written a synopsis worthy of the name. I’d never been taught how to do it. And like writing essays or business letters or feature articles, it’s not a format newbies can expect to toss off instinctively.

Maybe you’re thinking, hey, how can anybody who’s written three or four hundred pages of a novel be baffled by how to write a one-page summary telling what the whole thing is about? Except anyone who thinks that is not a writer who’s ever tried to cram those hundreds of pages into one.

Author/editor Sandy Steen at Dallas Mystery Writers actually gave her students more leeway than that, allowing them extra pages for character lists and elevator pitches – which will be the focus of another post.

Image: wikimedia commons

Two to three pages at most, Steen repeated. More often one page. “If the agent or editor wants it fleshed out, they’ll ask for more….It’s the concept you’re selling.”

Fortunately, Facebook friend and fellow writer Kathleen M. Rodgers had previously posted a link to “How to Write A One-Page Synopsis,” from Susan Dennard’s blog Pub(lishing) Crawl. Following Dennard’s “three rules of thumb, eleven-point method” gave me a coherent one-page (single-spaced) summary within an hour or two. I can’t guarantee this will get you offers of representation. But it saved my sanity and it can save yours.

Here are Dennard’s three rules of thumb:

 -- Don’t name more than three characters in a synopsis as short as one page: the protagonist, antagonist, and relationship character. (Steen also added that characters’ motivations, especially that of the main character should be included and very clear!) In writing my initial synopsis, I broke the three-character rule for a couple of secondary characters. With words at a premium, it took less space on a page to use a one-word name than the two-word description, “protagonist’s mother.”

-- Tell the ending. Right, spoilers and all. (This is not the “jacket blurb,” written to tease the reader. The agent/editor must know how everything fits together and that the ending is worthy of the rest of the story.)

-- Do not include sub-plots unless you have enough space. In writing my own synopsis, I bent this one for an agent who said she wanted to know if there were subplots. I sacrificed a single sentence to convey the biggest one briefly.

The eleven steps will be familiar to anyone who’s read Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey (although the nomenclature differs slightly) or any works dealing with three-act structure. They are: (1) opening image; (2) introduction to the protagonist, including his/her desire; (3) inciting incident; (4) plot point one; (5) conflicts and character encounters; (6) midpoint; (7) winning seems imminent, but. . . ; (8) black moment; (9) climax; (10) resolution; and (11) final image.

Weirdly enough, I got stuck figuring out what the midpoint was. In desperation, I thumbed halfway through my printed manuscript. And found what I needed.

If you’ve written any story at all, something major has happened halfway through the pages. If nothing leaps out at you from the exact numerical center, flip back or forward a few pages. Picking random examples from what’s on my nightstand -- it’s the place in Wuthering Heights where Catherine dies; where Tita of Like Water for Chocolate refuses the summons of her abusive mother; where the narrator of The Island of Dr. Moreau learns the extent of what the mad scientist has done. You will know the midpoint of your novel when you see it.

Susan Dennard applies this with examples from the movie Star Wars, which will also give you a much-needed laugh in her complete explanation.

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After posting this originally in 2013, I also located a blog by fantasy writer C.J. Redwine with other tips that may not be obvious to a first-timer: Write in present tense, in third person, in the same font as your novel, and mimic the pacing of your novel.

In general, a one-page synopsis will be single-spaced and longer synopses double-spaced. However, be sure to read the agent’s or editor’s instructions. For instance, I recently was asked to submit a 300-word synopsis with double spacing.

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And, oh, yes, I’ve also posted cavalier mentions of query letters and pitches. Stay tuned for more on these topics as conference season gets into full swing!

Wordcraft – Don’t be afraid to make a scene

A fellow critique partner writing a novel asked, why do we have to write in scenes? After all, as long as the information is on the page, why does it matter whether it’s in a “scene”, with characters thinking, speaking, acting in a particular place and time, or in paragraphs of straight prose. Taken aback, I gave her a short and truthful, if silly answer: because it’s a convention of English language fiction.

A short and truthful answer, because writing in scenes has been a convention of English language fiction, actually, almost any long-form prose such as novels, memoirs and creative nonfiction, for at least the past couple of centuries. But a silly answer because it didn’t address why the convention arose in the first place. Or why it really matters, whether it results in publication or not.

A story written in scenes is the closest we can humanly get to being inside the mind of another person. And longing to know how others, other human beings, feel and think and why they do the things they do, goes to the core of being human. Living as a human being means living in a particular place, with particular people, particular actions, particular thoughts, in real time. We don’t live in, can’t live in, whether we’d like to or not, an exposition-only world.

Given the importance of scenes, I was surprised when I reviewed my bookshelves without finding any books dedicated to writing scenes. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of discussion about scenes deep inside books about writing the things scenes comprise – novels and screenplays.

“A good plot is about disturbance to characters’ inner and outer lives. Scenes are what we use to illustrate and dramatize those disturbances,” novelist/writing instructor James Scott Bell writes in his Plot & Fiction. “Scenes are the essential building blocks of plot.”

Like the plot that they’re a subunit of, scenes need at least one character, a setting (time and place), and a disturbance. To paraphrase Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, scenes as well as novels have a protagonist, an ordinary world, and an inciting incident. What they lack, at least until the novel nears its conclusion is, well, a conclusion. And very often, the disturbance or inciting incident of one scene will have occurred in the previous scene, so that scene after scene links together, each depending on, but deepening what has gone before.

I’ve found that I learn as much from reading books I love – and looking more closely at why I love them – than from reading about them. So I looked at an early scene from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, with neighborhood gossip Rachel Lynde at her window, spying reclusive neighbor Matthew Cuthbert, who had earlier expressed his intention of planning his turnip seed that afternoon, instead “placidly driving over the hollow and up the hill. . . . Now where was Matthew Cuthbert going and why was he going there?”

Mrs. Lynde devotes the remainder of the scene (indeed, the entire chapter) to solving the riddle of Matthew’s strange behavior, only to learn things that will astonish her still further, continuing until the book’s end.

That opening scene ends with Rachel Lynde, having teased out the reason for Matthew’s journey, to bring home an orphan to help with his farm work, and asserting “I wouldn’t be in that orphan’s shoes for anything.” And so the story goes.

For more suggestions about scenes and their structure, I like “How to Write a Scene” by John August, posted September 21, 2015, on The Writer’s Circle magazine’s Facebook page, and “Make Your Scenes Earn Their Way” by Brooke Warner on SheWrites. I’ve posted both of these on my own Facebook page as well as Writer’s Circle’s September 15, 2015, Facebook post entitled, “Chapter Breaks,” for suggestions on scene endings.

Wordcraft -- Finding the path through our stories, part II

At the last meeting of the Dallas Mystery Writers, professional authors swooned over Daniel J. Hale’s discussion of plot structure. After outlining the three-act (or as he termed it, the four-act) structure of novels, he applied his method to the 12-step Writer’s Journey work of screenwriter Christopher Vogler.

Vogler’s initial memo while working for Disney was based on the writings of Joseph Campbell. Later expanded into book form, it postulated that stories are based on mythological narratives in twelve specific stages, giving writers a road map of places that must be visited during the course of the story. Vogler termed these stages The Ordinary World, Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Meeting with the Mentor and Crossing the First Threshold; Tests, Allies and Enemies; Approach to the Inmost Cave; Ordeal and Reward; and The Road Back, Resurrection and Return with the Elixir.

The Writer’s Journey method is taught in Southern Methodist University’s creative writing program which Hale teaches. Vogler’s terms map onto the three-act story discussed last week like this: Act One opens with a picture of the Ordinary World. It moves to the Call to Adventure, effectively the story’s “hook,” but often followed by the Refusal of the Call as the hero recognizes the danger of taking necessary action. A Meeting with the Mentor persuades the hero to undertake the necessary journey or other action, and prompting the him or her to Cross the First Threshold. Crossing the threshold is the decision point that pushes the story into its second act.

Act II includes a series of Tests and meetings with various allies and enemies, building through the Approach to the Inmost Cave and the Ordeal, Vogler’s apt term for the midpoint crisis that, in the three-act structure propels the story into the second half of Act II. At this point, the hero will gain some respite or knowledge from the encounter with the antagonist, the Reward that will aid the final struggle and precipitates the third act.

Act III opens with The Road Back, as the hero makes use of what he or she has learned in Act II, moving toward the climatic scene. Vogler’s term for the final struggle is Resurrection, followed by the Return with the Elixir. At this point, I find Vogler’s terminology sometimes more poetic than helpful. Sometimes the hero--Romeo for example--may die in the “Resurrection” scene. And “what the heck is an elixir,” is a question that‘s come up more than once in classes. I found it more helpful to recall that what Vogler terms Resurrection is more conventionally termed the story’s climactic moment. And the elixir is what the hero‘s world gains from his or her struggle (or even death).

In his presentation to the Dallas Mystery Writers this month, Hale emphasized that the twelve-step structure “is a structure, not a formula. It’s a tool to use to develop your story. Every character in your book has a hero’s journey. For some of your minor characters, you’re not going to see all their hero’s journey. What I do when I start a book is to layout the hero’s journey as a start. Initially, I will write the resurrection, which is the big fight scene, so I know where I’m going. And then (the course of the story changes) but I have a destination in mind.”

For more about the SMU creative writing program, see www.smu.edu/Simmons/CommunityEnrichment/CreativeWriting/.

I joined the Dallas Mystery Writers because I a) write suspenseful stories and b) was impressed by the curriculum at last year’s Mystery University it hosted. The speaker lineup for the monthly meetings is wonderfully informative for both pro and novice writers. See http://dallasmysterywriters.com/ for meeting information and programs.

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Other information for writers--Dallas-area fantasy/sci-fi conference FenCon seeks material for its annual short story contest, with payment in cash and prizes. Deadline is July 20. Or in you’re in grades three through 12 (or know an aspiring writer who is) FenCon’s Young Authors Short Story Contest offers cash, prizes and publication. Deadline is September 10. For rules and other information for both contests, see www.fencon.org/.

(Next Monday--Don’t hate me because I scored a ticket to hear Diana Gabaldon speak at the Dallas Museum of Arts program. I’ll bring you news from the master--or should that be mistress?--of historical romantic fiction.)

Wordcraft -- Character, character, character

I provided a link previously to the late Marion Zimmer Bradley’s explanation of why editors reject stories, but I’m going to break her discussion down into smaller nuggets over the next few weeks.  When I looked at her list of eight specific reasons for rejecting a story, it became obvious that the greatest number of these dealt with the likeability and strength of the characters.

Remember this discussion deals with short stories, rather than the defects of novels discussed in the columns dealing with agent Weronika Janczuk’s workshop.  Although I’ll have to confess that Weronika has since rejected my novel for keeping what she felt was an emotional distance from the characters – again, that pesky character issue.  So I hope working through this will help my writing also, and I appreciate your suggestions.  None of us have to write alone.

Reason number three on Bradley’s list of reasons for rejection was written as, the main character was not identifiable or was not likeable enough for the reader to want to identify him or her, or there were too many characters.  (This actually sounds like three separate reasons to me.  Clearly character is becoming more and more of a concern.)  Reason number four was:  the editor could not get interested enough in the characters to care whether they solved their problems.  And number six was:  the character did not have a serious enough problem or did not solve it by her own efforts.  (Reason number five:  nothing much changed and the characters ended where they started also sounds suspiciously character-related.)

For today, I’m going to deal with what sounds like the simplest of these problems, but obviously isn’t – is the main character identifiable? 

Last fall I mentioned a workshop whose leader urged death to the prologues so many of us used to start our stories.  (September 22, 2010 – Start at the beginning, go to the end, then stop.  The leader was Jessica Wade, associate editor at Ace/Roc books).  Although prologues slow the pace of a story, another of their deficiencies is that they frequently feature someone who is not the main character.  Not necessarily a fatal problem, but always a potential one.  So who is our main character?  Almost inevitably, the one who changes the most.  Or sometimes, for the group Christopher Vogler described as “catalyst heroes” in The Writer’s Journey, figures who bring about transformation in others – especially useful in serial stories.  One way or other, the main character – protagonist or hero – must either undergo significant change or bring about such change in the other characters.  If that doesn't describe your character, maybe you're writing about the wrong person.

For simplicity’s sake, Bradley also suggests limiting the total character cast – in a story of fewer than ten pages, using only a main character, a minor character and perhaps a couple of walk-ons, like the unnamed ticket clerk who annoys your main character and her date.  And watch the names.  I was once in a workshop with a woman who pointed out that I had multiple male characters whose names all started with the letter H.  Ouch!

(Next week:  The likeability factor – bringing extraordinary characters down to earth, or elevating the ordinary Janes and Joes.)