fiction

WRITE YOUR SYNOPSIS IN 7 EASY STEPS!

/ Edwina Shaw / Leave a comment
a winding dirt road over a stream, where children play
The winding path of writing your synopsis can be fun!

WHAT A SYNOPSIS IS NOT.

A synopsis in not a pitch. If you’re needing to send out a query email or a pitch to a publisher or producer, see my post on writing PITCHES HERE. In a pitch you cover genre, comparative titles, author information and give a one paragraph synopsis that gives the main action and themes of your story, but not the ending. 

SO WHAT IS A SYNOPSIS?

A synopsis is your entire story in a page, or two if you’re lucky. I can hear the screams from here! “What? How do I get my 80 000 word novel into one page. It’s impossible!”

Well yes, writing your whole book in a page IS impossible. But if you do a good job of writing your synopsis you can give your reader (a prospective agent, publisher or producer), a good idea of what you story is about and how the plot unfolds.

Your synopsis will introduce your main character/protagonist and their primary story goals; and also let us know who or what is opposing that goal. The body of your synopsis shows us how the battle between our hope that the protagonist will achieve their goal and our fear that they won’t and the worst will happen, plays out. For more on this see SUSPENSE = HOPE + FEAR. 

Your synopsis needs to include all major plot points, including the ending. Yes, even if there’s a twist you don’t want to give away.

Let’s get to it!

Writers at work!

STEP 1

Who is your main character?

Brainstorm your protagonist – what makes them stand out from the crowd? Harry Potter isn’t just a child wizard, he’s an orphaned child wizard whose parents were killed by Voldemort. In Jaws, Chief Brody isn’t just the police chief on the island, he feels responsible for the deaths on his watch, and he’s afraid of the water (important detail to include when he’s fighting a shark). 

Think of some contrasting adjectives to describe your character. In ‘Dear Madman’, my work in progress, the murderer is violent but vulnerable after a childhood of abuse in institutions. 

Write a sentence describing your protagonist. Remember to make them as interesting as possible. We want our characters to be a little MORE than us regular humans. A passionate but psychotic police officer is a lot more interesting than a lazy accountant.

STEP 2

What does your character want?

What is your character’s goal? Your primary character goal is established in your inciting incident – the unexpected event that sets the whole story in motion. 

In Harry Potter, Harry gets a letter inviting him to attend Hogwarts. In Jaws, a shark kills a swimmer at the same time as the holiday crowds arrive. In ‘Dear Madman’, the man is hired to work on the family farm. 

Brainstorm your character’s goals. You can do this on three levels:

Physical –  the material world (this is where the synopsis will mainly focus) 

Emotional – the world of love, romance, feelings

Spiritual – often, as in Harry Potter, this comes down to the battle between good and evil 

STEP 3

What opposes your main character’s goal? 

Who or what is stopping them get what they want? If you’ve written a romance, this may be a love rival, or societal or cultural issues, or even warring families (think Romeo and Juliet). It may be an antagonist like Voldemort or the shark in Jaws, or it may be the political or social setting of the story as in Hunger Games, or even the sea, if you’re writing a story about a lone sailor circumnavigating the world. Setting is important. See my article on setting HERE.

Identify the opposition to your main character’s goal and write it down.

STEP 4

What is at stake?

What’s the very worst thing that could happen if your character doesn’t achieve their goal?  Make it worse!

In Harry Potter, Voldemort will come to power and the world will be plunged into darkness. In Jaws, the shark will go on a human feeding frenzy and in Dear Madman, the man will murder the entire family in their beds.

Brainstorm what’s at stake.

You should already have all the answers within your story. If you’re having trouble coming up with answers to any of these questions, you may need to rethink before submitting. Write your synopsis then use it to ramp up the tension in your whole book/screenplay.

STEP 5

Write your logline/premise

Put STEPS 1, 2, 3 and 4 together to make your logline. For example: A police chief who’s afraid of the water and blames himself for the deaths on his watch, must hunt down and kill a giant shark before it kills again. Or: An orphaned child wizard must defeat the powerful warlock who killed his parents or the whole world will be plunged into darkness. 

Write your logline and use it to keep a tight focus in step 5.

STEP 5

Write down all your main plot points

Focusing on the primary goal of your character as identified in your logline, and the actions they take to achieve that goal, jot down all the major plot points in your book. Include other characters that play a significant role in the story, but don’t include subplots or other characters that don’t move the story goal forward.

If you’re not sure what I mean by plot points, think of all the key emotional turning points in your story.

Start with your inciting incident or hook. Then move onto what happens that makes it impossible not to take on the challenge, the plans your character makes, what happens to those plans, and a big unexpected event at the middle of your story – the midpoint – that makes everything worse. 

What actions does the antagonist take, or what events derail things? What’s the next big plan that fails and your character’s darkest moment? What gives them the determination to defeat the antagonist and achieve their goal? How do they change and grow? What’s the biggest plan and the big emotional moments in the climax? And then of course, what’s your ending.

Don’t worry if this takes pages, the next step will narrow it down.

STEP 6

Focus and finesse your list of plot points and write them in sentences. 

Remember to keep the focus in tight on your premise, and your protagonists attempts to achieve their main story goal. Start with your inciting incident and logline: Eg When a man-eating shark kills a young woman at the start of holiday season, a police chief who’s afraid of the water and blames himself for the death, must hunt down the shark before it kills again. Then move on through each of your significant plot turning points. 

Include your setting. This is vital for speculative fiction set in other worlds, or in any story where the setting impacts the action.

Cut, cut and cut again until you get as close to one page as you can. Then cut again.

Get yourself a cuppa and cut cut cut!

STEP 7

Inject your unique tone or voice

This is the trickiest part. If you’ve written a comedy, your synopsis needs to be funny. If you’ve written a thriller, the synopsis needs to keep us guessing. If you’ve written a romance, then the reader has to sigh and get dreamy. If you’ve written a literary novel your own unique voice needs to shine through.

Redraft your synopsis making sure it matches the tone and genre of your book.

Don’t despair the hardest part is done!

DONE!

Well not really, synopsis writing takes time. Be prepared to work on it for over a week, refining and finessing it. Show it to your writing buddies who know your story, but also to writing buddies who don’t. 

Have you shown enough of the storyline to hook them in? Does the story still make sense cut down to such a minimal outline? 

Does it feel dead on the page? Often they do – don’t worry – as long as your storyline has enough action, it will still work. You can try including a line or two of dialogue, especially if that’s one of your strengths.

Don’t give up. Yes, writing a synopsis is hard, but you’ve done hard things before. You’ve written a whole book!

Be proud of yourself!

I hope you’ll find these steps useful. Let me know how you go!

Lots of love

Edwina xx

HOW MANY DRAFTS?

/ Edwina Shaw / Leave a comment

How many drafts it takes to get your story to publishable standard?

As many as it takes!

One thing I know for sure after over two decades in the business as both writer and editor is that it is never just one!

If you’ve just written “The End”, congratulations on finishing your first draft. Books are huge projects that often take years of dedicated work. This can be less if you are writing genre fiction with established characters and story world, but if you want to make a work of heart-aching beauty, then it will take time.

The very messy first draft of 49 is a Dangerous Age! with some feedback from Vahida and my own scribbles!

Many new writers reach the end of their first draft, write “The End” and think they’re done. And of course, completing a first draft is an important and huge achievement. But it is not really the end. In fact, it’s more like the beginning. Sorry!

When you write the first draft, you’re creating the stone from which you will carve your beautiful piece of art. My old writing teacher, Amanda Lohrey, used to say the first draft was all about “excavating”. You are mining your life, your imagination, the story, for every little bit you as the writer need to know to create the book. But like a mine site, the excavation pile is a big ungainly mess – maybe a little less of a mess if you’re a meticulous planner, but it’s certainly not the polished gold or intricately cut diamond we envision as the final product.

Photo by Evie Shaffer on Pexels.com

A writing friend of mine, multi-award winning, published author, Kris Kneen, recently posted about cutting her first draft of over 100 000 words down to 30 000 for draft two. Yes, it’s true. Even a highly respected and experienced writer like Kris! But don’t worry. No writing is ever wasted because every word is necessary to bring us a thorough knowledge of the story and what it will become.

Many of my manuscripts have also been through the same procedure. The first draft was big and baggy, over 100 000 messy words, which then got chopped right down to a third of its original size after rethinking and discovering what the story was really about. If you can think through your plot a little before you start writing, you may be able to keep more of that first draft. But leave your mind and heart open to letting the book become what it wants to be. Each book has its own process and path. Trust in the drafting process to bring that book to life.

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com Hopefully it won’t kill you!

Here are some general guidelines about the drafting process. These are not hard and fast rules, but don’t send anything out to publishers/agents or competitions or self-publish without doing at least three drafts, two of your own and one with input from another writer.

Find a writing buddy to share the ride – read and give feedback on each other’s work like Alina and Jen!

DRAFTING PROCESS:

  1. Draft 1 – excavating the story, everything goes in, go off on tangents, let characters have their way. Make a big, baggy, messy – keep writing forward till you reach the end. CELEBRATE ! Put the draft away and don’t look at it for at least a few weeks. 
  • Draft 2 – get out draft one, and read through it carefully. I like to print it out at this stage and read in hard copy, circling bits that are working, scribbling in the margins for possible additions, crossing out all those long boring stretches of introspection or repetition. Cut at LEAST 10 %. Then sit down and ask yourself, “What is this story about? What is it really about?”  Once you know, write yourself a list of changes, possible new scenes, perhaps a whole new plan and start again. Yes, you’ll be doing a lot of new writing – but this time it will be more focused. That’s Draft 2. When it’s done – CELEBRATE! Draft 2 is the toughest and now you’ve done it.
  • Draft 3 – once you’re happy with the latest draft send it to a writing friend or a professional structural editor/manuscript assessor. You can send it to more than one, but don’t overwhelm yourself. Three is a good number. When you receive their feedback, thank them, then sit with their responses for a while. Your gut will tell you what is right for you. Then go back through and redraft according to the feedback and do a thorough copy edit looking closely at every sentence as you go. Editor Judith Lukin-Amundsen once told me to cut the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Before you run wailing to the hills, you don’t actually have to do this. But do look closely at every paragraph, every sentence, every word. Does it need to be there?

Once you’ve done that draft you can start looking at sending to potential publishers, agents, competitions or other publishing pathways.

This process can be repeated multiple times – except the first draft, you only get to do that freewheeling fun once. The rethinking, getting feedback and redrafting can be done over and over again. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve done thousands of drafts of a story or scene – but I am prone to exaggeration!

How do we know when the MS is ready? 

A good sign for me is when I feel sick at the thought of redrafting anymore or when I’m afraid I’ll make it worse instead of better, and most of all when the feedback I’m receiving from writing friends is consistently positive. Friends and family members who aren’t writers don’t count, they’ll just tell you it’s “jolly good” or dismiss it because they don’t understand the work of each sentence. Find writing buddies whose writing you respect. People with experience who know the craft of creating good stories.

Don’t make the mistake I did early in my career of sending out uncooked manuscripts, fresh from draft one with a redraft checking the spelling. No no no! Give your story the best possible chance in this competitive marketplace by polishing it until it shines.

For more tips on self-editing SEE HERE and HERE.

GOOD LUCK with the next draft! Let me know how you go.

And wish me luck with Draft Two of “49 is a Dangerous Age” my coming of middle-age comedy. Gearing up to tackle that over the festive season!

As many drafts as there are mushrooms!

In other news we have only 2 ROOMS LEFT for our Heavenly Hoi An Writing Retreat – February 10 – 16/2025. Beautiful private rooms sharing a deluxe bungalow on the river with your own living spaces, including outdoor area plus kitchen and shared bathroom. NOW $500 off for our Black Friday sale! All the info HERE. Bring your writing buddy or come on your own and share with a new writing friend who’ll become a buddy! Come and join us for a comprehensive writing course in a beautiful location. Small group so you’ll get heaps of individual attention and feedback. Great Xmas present for yourself! We always have a wonderful time!

Lots of love,

Edwina 🙂 xx