Hatrack River Writers Workshop: FIRST STAB, help wanted, will write for food

This is topic FIRST STAB, help wanted, will write for food in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Zero (Member # 3619) on :

Okay, I have decided to make my first entry into a slushpile.

There is a novel that I have co-written with my cousin and we've spent considerable years developing it and have written it through multiple times. Now the tweaking and polishing has reached a point where we agree it is time to send it off on its maiden voyage.

We have chosen to start with Tor. Our package we're mailing included the first three chapters of the manuscript and a synopsis of the plot. [I think that is it]

But the synopsis I have questions about. I was operating under the logic, at the time, that I should write what happens on a chapter by chapter basis. I have reduced this to include only events, just flat events:

Something like this format all the way through,

quote:
ie: chapter 10
-John visits Sue, they have a disagreement. It turns to violence. Sue beats him and he flees her house.
-Micheal is baking cookies when John arrives at his house. He with-holds his hate for John and appeases his friend by letting him eat all the cookies. Michael gives John a room and then makes plans to kill him that very night.

Obviously this is not from my synopsis but this is an example of what I've done. The book is 3rd person limited multiple view points and each chapter is composed of several scenes. I say flatly what is in each scene in each respective chapter all the way through the entire novel. This still leaves out a lot about the books and sounds a bit dispassionate, (which might be good?), and is still incredibly long.

This boils down to two main questions.
1) Is this the wrong approach? If so what kind of synopsis is any given publisher looking for? A one page summary of the whole story? A ten page detailed scene by scene breakdown?

2)What is the suggested length per chapter, or per novel, for a good/standard synopsis.

Okay I lied I have a 3rd question.
3) What advice do any of you have that have gone through this process before?

As they say online, I'm quite a "noob." I'd love your help and expertise.

Posted by oliverhouse (Member # 3432) on :

If you haven't already done it, you might consider getting an agent first. For a lot of interesting advice in that direction, visit Miss Snark: http://misssnark.blogspot.com. There are lots of others you can read, too, some of whom are on her blogroll.

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

(Tor is looking at unagented stuff right now?)

When I made a full outline to go with my three chapters---all rejected, so take what I say with a grain of salt---it usually wound up about as long as any one chapter in the novel itself.

What I always wondered was whether I should break the outline into chapter-by-chapter divisions. I always did---but I've kept wondering whether I should have just submitted an overview without divisions in this manner. I don't know---I got a lot of rejections but no opinions.

Posted by spcpthook (Member # 3246) on :

Also speaking from the viewpoint of the unpublished. I started out doing what you are proposing here. Attempting to cover every detail "I" considered pertinent to the story. My synopsis repeatedly came out longer than submission guidelines called for. I have shortened my synopsis on a 119,000 word novel to approx. 1.5 pages, by searching out the only truly important points of the MS. We need to know the main characters. And from when I submitted my synopsis for critique I got that the main characters did not necessarily include everybody I thought was important. So what if A tried to killed B for two chapters. He ultimately failed so it boils down to "after avoiding attempts on her life." A is not important enough to be mentioned by name.

I'd write it bare bones first i.e. george had superpowers and he saved the world from villian joe. then fill in the most pertinent details. George woke up one morning and found he could fly, and was super strong. He noticed a strange weakness though when he was in the presence of snap peas. He also discovered that all the plots his best friend Joe had been bringing up over the past months weren't fantasy. Joe was trying to take over the world. He knew now why he had been granted these powers. And he knew why Joe had taken a sudden liking to snap peas.--and of course let everybody know that in the end George defeated Joe.

The best advice I've received thus far is to try not to let it be dry and flat. Try to invoke some of the emotion of the MS. Anybody who's read a text book knows that reading data is flat out boring and doesn't really hold a readers interest long. I included lines in my last synopsis like, "now all she had to do was survive meeting her father-in-law."
"Two deaths and some divine intervention later she was welcomed into the family." The above two sentences covered several chapters worth of cat and mouse hunting and killing between assassins and glossed over the fact that she herself nearly dies. Is it important to the story that she nearly dies. Yes. but its not important to the story arc.

Of course I've received advice before to have different versions of a synopsis, in case the submission guidelines want something longer(read as more detailed). I've submitted my long version of a synopsis multiple times and been rejected something around that often. My short one that I ran through a critique group is on it's maiden voyage so hopefully I'll have some results before long, one way or the other.

Posted by Verloren (Member # 3916) on :

I am by no means an expert (as I have not published any fiction yet - I've done technical articles and newspaper articles), but I am working through Fiction 101 by Randy Ingermanson right now. He is the "Snowflake Method" guy.

I don't know if he is right about this stuff, but he has been published a few times.

His Snowflake method, seems to help you write the proposal as well as the novel. He suggests an approximately 4-page story synopsis, in paragraph format.

However, he says that now he does "character synopses" of a page per major character since editors supposedly love character-based fiction.

For more info about his methods, check out http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/the_snowflake.html

Much success!

-V