The sick thing about receiving homework after being out of school for eons is that it’s actually rather exciting. Last week, our mentor for the YA/Genre workshop of the Lambda Literary Foundation Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices, Malinda Lo, emailed us information about how she plans to run the workshop and what we need to send in advance. We were asked to submit the first 40 pages of our novels along with a synopsis. My thought process went as follows: 40 pages? Awesome! I’ve got those right here. Synopsis? Synopsis…? Bueller?
Frell me with a frelling flagpole.
Deadlines, however, are extremely motivating. I asked the other members of the LLF retreat group if they had any tips or resources for synopsis writing. Tess Sharpe posted a link to this fabulous article, which completely saved my ass.
The most important thing I noticed myself needing to do as I wrote and edited was to delete every sentence that didn’t essentially say, “character X did Y, which resulted in Z.” While some tone of the novel should be preserved in the synopsis, a 500-word overview does not leave room for excessive description or complex subplots like the dim pools of sorrowful lamplight swathing the cobblestones of a city street or the fourteen-legged mutant octopus that is a metaphor for the time your main character ran for school president twenty years ago.
Things to include in a synopsis:
- Sense of setting
- Main character/what the main character wants
- Inciting incident
- Main plot events
- Climax
- Ending
The list and examples provided by the following link are much better (Star Wars!), so I highly recommend checking it out.
The funny thing is, after all the initial stress and angst, I feel good about my synopsis now that it is done. It’s not perfect, but I gained some important things from writing it. Now I know that I am capable of condensing my entire novel into 500-600 words. Also, looking at my novel at a macro level clarified the revisions I need to make to the ending. Guess I’d better get back to work!