Writing A Synopsis or Just Shoot Me Now
The writing world is filled with sadomasochistic freaks - and I am one of them.
We writers spend days, months, sometimes years writing our book. We research and pour over dictionaries and thesauruses, painstaking selecting each word. We tear parts of it up and build it over again. We sweat and bleed and cry over it until we think it's close to perfect. We birth tales of humor and love and pain and discovery that are about 100,000 words long.
And some asswipe in New York many moons ago decided you had to cut it down to three pages for the synopsis.
WHAT?!?!?!
But it gets even better.
I recently registered for a fabulous conference and part of the perk to registry early was to get the chance to send in a pitch to an editor who was attending but not taking normal pitch appointments. Bonus! She's from a very good publishing house and is well respected. You got to actually submit two pitches and she would select the top ten of all of them to have a personal one-on-one meet with her at the conference.
Yes, of course there's a catch. Your three page synopsis, approximately 700 words? TOO LONG! Hone it to a maximum of 100 WORDS!
ARGH!!!!! I think they're just trying to make my head explode.
(Don't ask me how - I actually did it.)
We writers spend days, months, sometimes years writing our book. We research and pour over dictionaries and thesauruses, painstaking selecting each word. We tear parts of it up and build it over again. We sweat and bleed and cry over it until we think it's close to perfect. We birth tales of humor and love and pain and discovery that are about 100,000 words long.
And some asswipe in New York many moons ago decided you had to cut it down to three pages for the synopsis.
WHAT?!?!?!
But it gets even better.
I recently registered for a fabulous conference and part of the perk to registry early was to get the chance to send in a pitch to an editor who was attending but not taking normal pitch appointments. Bonus! She's from a very good publishing house and is well respected. You got to actually submit two pitches and she would select the top ten of all of them to have a personal one-on-one meet with her at the conference.
Yes, of course there's a catch. Your three page synopsis, approximately 700 words? TOO LONG! Hone it to a maximum of 100 WORDS!
ARGH!!!!! I think they're just trying to make my head explode.
(Don't ask me how - I actually did it.)
I just spent the weekend before last working on a synopsis so I could enter a contest I was interested in. Came in at ten pages.
Then I decided to drop the ten pages to three so I could include the entire first two chapters in the contest.
I don't guarantee those three pages are any good. But it does explain the plot, the character GMC and the Character growth. It just does it very quickly.
lol
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Trish - good job! It's hard to chop it all down, dammit. Major kudos to you!
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I'm very interested in this subject and I myself do alot of research as well. Either way it was a well thoughtout and nice read so I figured I would leave you a comment. Feel free to check out my website sometime and let me know what you think soin.
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