Five Things to Know About Synopses (Patreon)

Working at Angry Robot, I read a *lot* of synopses. Writing my own synopses for novels when getting ready to pitch/submit alongside reading them for work helped me come to see synopses as very solidly their own kind of writing. Here’s a few of my main takeaways and thoughts about synopses and what writers should know about them:


1) Writing a Synopsis is Another Way of Telling the Story

When you’re writing a synopsis, you’re re-telling the story. A good synopsis is, for me, an evocative and abbreviated performance of the story to help a reader get a handle on what to expect from the novel. A synopsis is not just a selling document or a hoop you have to jump through to get an agent. It can be a useful clarifying exercise as well – helping you figure out what is most central to your work, to reflect on tone and figure out how to convey that in a concise fashion.

I’ve found that getting better at writing and thinking about synopses has also made me better at hand-selling books because I can take a one-to-two-page synopsis and then condense that into a one-minute pitch to deploy if someone expressed interest in a book. That micro-synopsis isn’t the *first* pitch I give for a book, it’s the one I build toward if someone is working to meet me half-way through interest or asking questions about the book.



2) The Excited 12-Year-Old

But how do you write a synopsis so that it does all of those things I say it should do?

A framework I heard and have internalized as a good option for thinking about it is that reading a synopsis should feel like you’ve just given a bright, excitable 12-year-old your book, they’ve read it and loved it, and now they’re trying to explain it to a good friend in a few minutes. They need to do it in a way that the story sounds exciting and their friend doesn’t tune out because the narration is boring or because it’s too hard to follow b/c of excessive detail. And, of course, adjust this framework as needed for thoroughly adult material. The point is to focus on what’s important and infuse the synopsis with a sense of urgency and excitement.


3) Reading the Synopsis Should Feel Like Reading the Novel

Another way to make sure your synopsis is pulling its weight is to ensure that the synopsis is written in the same tone (and maybe the same style) as the novel. If your novel is a fast-paced action comedy, the synopsis should read fast and be funny. It should suggest that the writer has a good handle of pacing and knows how to deploy comedic prose. That might go as far as including jokes within the synopsis that aren’t necessarily jokes in the novel.

Again, a synopsis is a *different version* of the story from the novel – each format has its structures and demands. If you’re writing a contemplative character study, the synopsis should reflect that – a strong sense of interiority, of the mood of the scenes and the structure of the novel. The details shouldn’t vary, but some of the *how* of telling the story will need to – since you’re doing it in a few pages instead of several hundred.


4) Tell the Whole Story, But Not Every Part of It AKA Don’t Spare The Spoilers

Synopses range from one page to five or more. This variation can be frustration, because it means that the form is more malleable and less consistent. Some agents or editors want a one-page synopsis while another asks for a five-page version.

What remains the same is that a synopsis should give the full shape of a story. Where the characters/situation begins, what complicates and unfolds, what the important beats and turning points are, and it must especially give the ending of the book.

Spoil your plot. Do not hold back your cool twist ending.

More on the why below.


5) Some People Will Read Your Synopsis and Not the Novel

When I participated in editorial meetings at Angry Robot, I seldom had the time to read all of every single novel up for consideration. My job was not an editorial position, and I do not read that fast. I also refused to “just put in the hours” at night and let what was explicitly a 40-hour a week job balloon into 50 or more hours a week.

I didn’t have the time to read three whole novels for one meeting, but I always made sure to read the synopsis. I read them to get a sense of what to expect from the novel. Tone, genre, setting, worldbuilding, and style. A great synopsis will more clearly convey a sense of these parts of a novel than what you get from even a good query letter, though they’re only a few pages longer. If a writer coyly held back their Cool Ending Twist by not including it in the synopsis, then I usually did not know there was a twist when I went into the meeting. So I’d either need someone to read me in on the twist during the meeting if it was relevant or I’d say my piece without having all of the information.

As the Sales & Marketing Manager and sometimes Assistant Art Director, I needed to know as much about a book as I could at those meetings to be able to speak on topics related to my position. If I stepped into a meeting not knowing the answer to “What is the speculative/magical element in this novel?”, I could not be fully prepared to be able to talk about how the book would fit into Angry Robot’s list, how I’d be pitching it to sales reps, what kind of cover we’d be giving it, what comparative titles we would use, and more.

At a small publisher, you might be so lucky that every member of the staff can make time to read your whole novel when making a decision about whether to offer. But the importance of the synopsis is even greater for larger publishers, where more staff outside the specific imprint take part in the meetings. That outside staff has even less time to read entire manuscripts, and will often respond to a novel’s prospects almost entirely based on the sense they get from the synopsis.

If you’re a querying author, the agent might read the synopsis before the MSS. An assistant might read the synopsis before deciding whether to bother reading the novel. They might read the synopsis and then decide that they want to get to X part of the novel to see if it’s as cool as the synopsis makes it out to be.

The synopsis needs to be as good as you can make it.


The Big Picture

Since going full-time as an author, I’ve offered consulting services for publishers and other authors. My most popular service is the Pitch Package Analysis. Precisely because of my experience at editorial meetings, where I learned to see the query letter, the synopsis, and the manuscript itself as interconnected parts of a whole that is What Is This Novel And What Could It Be If It Was Published?

Every novel can be several different things – it can be a romance to one reader, a cool world to another, and so on. Helping a prospective agent or publisher see your novel holistically, to see every side and facet, will go a long way toward giving you the best chance of finding the right partner for your work. It’s important to not get so bogged down in writing a synopsis that you don’t submit the novel, but there’s also a lot to be gained by taking synopsis writing as an opportunity to flex different versions of storytelling skills and give yourself the best possible chance of sparking interest in a potential agent, editor, or publishing staffer.

It’s important to add that I never wanted to be bored reading a synopsis. I always wanted a novel to excite, to inspire. The better you do your job writing the synopsis, the happier your agent and/or your publishers will be and the more excited to advocate for you and your work.

And then everyone wins.