Ah, the synopsis. That most painful of things, where an author has to compress a novel’s worth of organic sproutings into one or two concise pages. And oh, how we wail and gnash our teeth when called upon to do so.
“It’s just so HARD,” we say. “I don’t WANT TO.”
But here’s the truth; you have to. This is the way a publisher can a) determine your ability to get to the point b) determine that you actually have written a book with a defined beginning/middle/end c) be sold on the sizzle of your steak.
It’s a marketing document, and I don’t think they’re actually that difficult to do. Some folks I know and respect spend inordinate amounts of time on these – with all due respect, I think they’re all crazy. We’re talking weeks, even months of time. On a 1-2 page marketing document.
Here’s what I believe: if you can’t get a synopsis right in an afternoon, you need to hand in your writer card. Here’s the Fisch One-Page/One-Afternoon Synopsis Method.
1) Present tense throughout. Limited or no adjectives.
2) Three or four biggish paragraphs. The first one briefly introduces your protagonist, one or two tag-line style descriptors of your setting, and brushes over the opening act of your novel.
3) Second paragraph introduces the antagonist/conflict, and brushes over the second act of your book. Again, broad strokes, and don’t worry too much about your subplots and the nitty gritty. We’re talking how you would convince someone at a bar to sleep with your book (if that makes sense). If you bore the poor person with a detailed description of your stamp collection, you’re going home alone.
4) Third paragraph goes over your final act, and resolves everything. Don’t do rhetorical questions here: “does she survive the assassination attempt? BUY MY BOOK AND FIND OUT.” the point of the thing is, you have to tell the reader, in present tense, exactly how the conflict is addressed, and how the story resolves.
5) Connect these three biggish paragraphs with one sentence movie-style taglines, just to keep it interesting. This also proves your ability to write succinctly, and provides a bit of life to what might otherwise be a boring marketting document.
6) Close off with a pitching paragraph, something along the lines of this: ‘”Papa Lucy and the Boneman” is a complex fantasy, designed to appeal to readers of Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe. If Gilgamesh found himself on the set of Mad Max, this is the story that might result.’
And that’s IT. That’s all you have to do. Go back over it of course, tighten everything up, take out every unnecessary word, and make it as interesting as you can. If an adjective pops up, kill it dead. I maintain that you can knock one of these out in an afternoon, anything else is just an exercise in masochism.
It’s all official like, I am a mentor in the Australian Horror Writers Association 2012 mentor program. And I have two mentees that I’d like to introduce to y’all.
Given into my tender care are the following writers: Stacey Larner and David McDonald. From what I’ve seen of their writing, these folks both have a lot of promise. They’re hard-working, keen as beans, and hopefully some big things await my writer-kids. Now it’s up to me to pass on what knowledge I’ve gleaned over the years, help them get some work polished to within an inch of its life, and generally hang around, dropping wisdom like Obi-Wan Kinobi (I think).
In my non-writing life, I’ve sometimes been known to assemble a posse of the like-minded and take over the nearest karaoke bar. It started off as dutch courage and ten people crowded around a microphone, to going it alone and improvising strange poetry in the middle of “Stairway to Heaven”, even committing crimes against harmonica accompaniment. Finally I went along to regular karaoke seasons at my old local, the Rex Hotel. My 25th birthday (approx 10 years ago!) I rented out the entire sports bar and we belted out the karaoke until the small hours.
One of my favourite memories of Clarion South was when most of the class took over a Brisbane karaoke bar and we blew off six weeks of stress in one night of crazy tune-crankage. Good times 🙂
Some years back I made the finals of a local karaoke contest, but bombed out in the last round. Fast-forward to now, and I’m leafing through the Messenger, when I find out about this thing called the Karaoke World Championship. The Australian winner gets to represent our country in Finland, and apparently it’s a massive deal.
Local heats were being held around SA, including the Rex Hotel. Rounded up the posse, cranked it out, and now I’m in the venue finals 🙂 if I can manage to get through the next round, then it’s onto the state finals for Team Fisch.
“About 200 camels have been removed from South Australia’s remote Aboriginal lands as part of a feral camel management project.
Aboriginal people have been trained to muster the camels, creating an industry and turning an environmental problem into a source of income for the APY Lands.
The camels are transported to Queensland abattoirs for processing.”
The good folks over at the Writers of the Future contest have rereleased the video of the 2010 awards ceremony. They’ve chopped the 2 hr + video into accessible 5 minute chunks, organised into order of the award recipients! Most excellent. Here you see me and my illustrator Seth J Rowanwood collect our award statues, and thank the folks who got us there. Added bonus – a crooked bow-tie that apparently drove my poor mother crazy 🙂
If you’re a budding SF writer or illustrator, you could do worse than to enter this contest. Info can be found here:
