Since I said a bad word last week, I might as well drop the other one this week — SYNOPSIS.
*waits for the screaming and teeth gnashing to stop*
Done? Okay. Moving on. The only thing authors hate as much, if not more, than a query letter is a synopsis. Yeah, yeah. We all hate it but get over it since it’s a necessary evil in this career.
I’m going to make this simple yet again. And like last time, it’s only NOT simple if you make it hard. There are tons of sites out there that offer synopsis-writing advice. These two are the best (IMO) since these two actually made sense and put the information in a straight forward, easy to understand manner.
Explanation #1: http://www.aliciarasley.com/artthreeacts.htm
Explanation #2 (which just says what’s in #1 in a different way): http://www.patricemichelle.net/goodies/articles.html#Synopsis
These two pages have helped me muddle through every synopsis I’ve ever written. They may not have been fantastic but they were finished. And finished beats waiting-to-be-written any day of the week. Once you write it, you can tweak it and make it better. But you can’t tweak something that isn’t even written.