how to write a synopsis writers will spend years writing, lovingly polishing and then marketing a novel, and yet they shrug off the synopsis with a comment like i hate writing synopses. I used to hate them because the ones i wrote sucked all the life from the novel, reducing it to bare bones sentences that did nothing to capture the depth of the novel itself. Now i hate writing synopses because they are much more difficult to write than the novel ever was. The synopsis is the most important part of your submission package and, as such, it has to be developed and sweated over and polished with the same attention you devoted to the novel itself. Along with the cover letter, the synopsis is what sells the editor on the manuscript.

If they don't see anything they like in the synopsis, they won't even glance at your chapter samples. Think of it as the jacket blurb for your novel the synopsis is often used in writing this, and by the publisher's art and advertising departments, if the novel is purchased , and write it as though you're trying to entice a casual bookstore browser to buy the novel and read it. But how? rather than being daunted by the enormity of such a task, break it down.

The first step, of course, is realizing that you're going to have to write a synopsis if you intend to market your novel, that is. The best time to realize this is just before you sit down with your manuscript for the final reading preparatory to declaring the thing completed. As you finish reading each chapter, write down a one or two paragraph summary of what happened where, and to which character, in that chapter. Notice any themes running through your chapters as you're reading? symbolism you didn't realize you'd woven through the story while you were slogging away at the computer for all those months? the subconscious mind is a wonderful thing. You may just discover your one line story summary that agents and editors like so much, if you didn't know what it was before.

Or even if you thought you knew what it was, before surprise, says the muse, you were wrong. What you will have when you are done is a chapter by chapter novel outline, what i call my author's outline. This is pretty dry reading, and since chapter by chapter outlines seem to have fallen out of favor with editors and agents, this will likely remain one of your most valuable writing tools, and that's about it.

You may know the story intimately now, but you do forget details over time. You may decide to revise the novel in the future, and this outline will help you. I've used mine to make sure i'm not duplicating character names from one project to the next. Reading an outline is much easier than leafing through or rereading an entire novel. What you are doing, basically, is distilling the story down into smaller and more manageable packages, step by step. So, you pinpoint the most important plot points in that outline, and you put them into a synopsis.

We're talking about only those events and motivations that moved the story forward in a major way. We're talking about only the most important characters, the ones your reader will ultimately care about, not the bit players. Now i want you to envision one or two things while you rework that synopsis:
imagine that you're writing a jacket blurb for the novel, one that will pique the casual browser's curiosity and make him or her want to buy the book to see what happens.