Writing The Damn Synopsis!

I’ve been quiet for a while, trying to finish the first draft of my novel, almost dreading the moment it would be finished, because then – like all novelists- I face that dreaded Armageddon of Self-Belief when I have to write the synopsis.  Many would say I’m now returning to the blog only because I can also use that as a fine distraction from doing what I’m supposed to be doing (i.e. writing the damn synopsis), to which I say, ‘Don’t be so annoyingly smart!’

My good friend, Rod Duncan, (he of the ‘Bullet Catcher’s Daughter’ and nominee for the Philip K. Dick Prize – buy it; it’s great!), once gave me the following basic formula:

“Write four bullet points with the following blanks filled in:
1) This is a story about [PERSON] in [SETTING]
2) It is what happens when [EVENT]
3) This sets up a [GOAL] which [PERSON] must work towards
4) And in the end [THIS] happens.”

“Expand each bullet point and you’re good to go,” he says.

This may be a workable template, but I think the devil is in the detail. Most synopses I get to read fail on Point 3. They do a great job of cutting down the plot from tens of thousands of words to a few hundred, but in doing so they lose sight of the fact that the events in the ‘plot’ aren’t what the novel is about. The novel is really about what’s happening in Point 3, and how the end (Point 4) shows us something new and profound about the person and his/her goals.

Bottom Line: we need to think a lot more about Point 3!  (And that’s a note to myself, by the way.)

Here’s what I’m thinking (three days into trying to write my own synopsis of the most complex book I’ve ever attempted):

Synopsis is not about plot. Synopsis is about the way the plot points illustrate what the story is about in its ‘essence’.   And -if you want to get a bit fancier – ‘essence’ is what the reader takes away from the story.  It’s about their reaction to it, and often it isn’t even explicit in the text itself.  What I have taken from great books/films etc., are wisdoms that I would usually express in words that are not in the text.

For example – let’s go with a classic – Hamlet is about a boy whose stable world is turned upside down by the death of his powerful father, the threat his uncle poses to his life, and the way he later grows into a man willing to fight for both his natural inheritance and his place in the world. Now, very interestingly, I’ve described what the story means to me without ever revealing any real detail of how the plot points happen. If I were writing a synopsis, I could go on from here and show how my action (the ghosts, plays within plays, trips to England, drowned girlfriends, meeting strange men in graveyards, playing with poisoned swords etc.) illustrate the story essence that I’ve just described.

I could also, by the way, use the same story essence to construct a synopsis of the Lion King, which is how I know the difference between the story’s essence and its plot. The plot is what happens (the ghosts, sword fights etc. I was mentioning above in one case; lions, warthogs and cute songs about the circle of life in the other – oh, and did I mention one of them is a cartoon?) ; the essence is about the underlying emotional journey of the main character (we recognise Simba’s journey= Hamlet’s journey; and we could write the same words for Point 3 for each story).

So what? you say. OK, I say this: It’s through the explanation of story essence highlighted in Point 3 that the novel makes sense to any reader and if you leave that out of your synopsis, no reader/agent/ publisher will ever get a true sense of it.

Now I’ve convinced myself that’s true, all I have to do is write the damn synopsis!