Slashing a Fat Synopsis
Well, I finished my first draft of the synopsis for Fire On Mist Creek.
3,642 words.
Now, opinions differ on how long a novel synopsis should be. (In my opinion, I should be rich enough to hire someone else to write my synopsis and not worry about how long a synopsis should be.) The general consensus in the writing community is that a synopsis should be kept strictly between two thousand words and, oh, fifty words long. But the shorter the better; just like opera, or congressional term limits, or that little guy from Game of Thrones.
"Did you just call me a LITTLE GUY?"
So I have some cutting to do, and with an ax, not a scalpel. There's a certain irony in cutting a novel down to something you then have to cut down. Meanwhile, I've identified a possible publisher for the book, but according to their publishing guidelines my novel is four hundred words ... too long. (Which is not something I'm remotely worried about for the moment.)
Later I'll probably have to boil my synopsis down into a back page blurb. There'll be significant shrinkage.
This is so much easier than writing a synopsis.
Good excilent posting
It should be a bit more detailed than a pre-war telegram, I guess, but not quiet telling the entire story of the book. Then people dont have read the book anmore. Or they dont bother reading the synopsis if they see its too long to read it quickly.
So yeah, ideally let someone else write it. :)
Sadly, letting someone else write it isn't in the cards! Of course, a synopsis isn't meant for many people to read--just editors and agents--so having people not read the book because of one isn't a huge problem. I read just yesterday that many editors don't read the entire synopsis anyway--they pretty much judge based on cover letter and the first one to three chapters. Their world, their rules.
Hearing how they seem to operate, its surprising that they read anything at all. May be they just throw a dart at a printed list of author names. :)
The thing is, many of those grizzled old editors are so experience that they can tell in the first paragraph whether your work is good for them or not. So it had better be a darned good first paragraph!