After spending the last five years writing my first novel, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’d figured out how to write a synopsis sooner rather than later I could have cut that time in half.
If you figure out whether the story holds water before you begin to write, you can save so much heartache. I agonized over every story decision I had to make. I couldn’t keep the story in my head because it was so jumbled. Once I had a synopsis, I could see at a glance what needed to happen next. But as a new writer, figuring out how to write a synopsis was hard! Just throwing myself into the writing of the pages and seeing where they took me was a lot more appealing, but I always ground to a halt after a few chapters because I didn’t know how to proceed.
If I hadn’t learned how to write a synopsis with Mary Buckham, author of BREAK INTO FICTION (Adams Media, 2009), I would still be floundering. Mary and her co-author Dianna Love have designed a method of finding the essence of your story via a series of templates. By answering the templates’ questions I learned to harness the wild horse of story, and in my answers, as if by magic, appeared all its salient parts. (more…)
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