Writing That Pesky Synopsis–Strategy

We’ve spent the last couple of days clearing the ground so we could talk about how to write a synopsis for your novel. Today, we’ll get into details.

You are shooting for about 2 single-spaced pages in your synopsis. Let’s do a little math here.

A single-spaced page holds about 500 words, so we’re talking about 1000 words.

Your novel is going to be about 100,000 words, so you want something only 1% the size of a novel. In fact, you want something with about as many words as ONE of your average scenes.

Your novel will have 80 to 100 scenes in it. If you use 1000 words to cover those scenes, then you could only use about 10 to 12 words per scene! That’s about one sentence per scene.

You can’t say much in one sentence, so the fact is that you can’t even summarize every scene and do it justice. So you need a strategy to condense the story even more sharply. I’ll give you that strategy now, but first I need to give you a little background information:

I’ve been rereading Robert McKee’s book STORY recently, gleaning any wisdom I could from him. I had read his book years ago and found it overly complicated. This time, I got a bit more out of it. I have always believed that a story has four different layers of plot, ranging from the highest level down to the lowest level, as follows:
1) The one-sentence summary of the story
2) The 3-Act Structure
3) Scenes
4) Motivation Reaction Units

After rereading McKee, I think there are actually six different layers of plot, as follows:
1) The one-sentence summary of the story
2) The 3-Act Structure
3) Sequences of scenes
4) Scenes
5) Beats (groups of Motivation Reaction Units)
6) Motivation Reaction Units

The important thing to notice is #3 on that second list–Sequences of scenes. What McKee points out is that not all scenes are created equal. Some of them are more exciting and some are less exciting. They actually clump together into sequences of 3 to 5 scenes, in which the tension rises to a peak.

The reason this is important is that if you do the math, you’ll find 20 to 25 sequences in your novel. So if you identify your sequences of scenes and write one paragraph on each one, you’ll have 20 to 25 paragraphs, which should just about fill up 2 pages.

That, therefore, is your strategy for writing a synopsis: Identify the sequences of scenes in your novel and write a paragraph about each one. If you have already Snowflaked your novel, then you have a spreadsheet with one line for each scene. So it should be easy to scan down that spreadsheet and find the sequences.

That’s the strategy. What about tactics? How do you write each paragraph so they all combine to make a dazzling synopsis? We’ll cover tactics tomorrow.