How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Synopsis

October 28th, 2009 by Sara

A while back, I had to write a synopsis for a book I was working on. Ugggg.

I’d written synopses for that story before and most of them sounded as if they should be narrated by this guy.

Which is dramatic and all, but maybe not exactly what I was going for. I mean my synopses certainly got your attention, they didn’t necessarily describe my book very well.

It took me a while to realize what the problem was. Turns out, in the early drafts, I didn’t really know what my book was about. Sometimes our stories are so big in our minds, that we wander through the world, entertaining ourselves and our readers, but forgetting where we are going. And it’s not until you try to write the synopsis that you realize you’ve lost your way.

Because a synopsis forces you to cut through all the action and mystery and distill it down to exactly what your book is about. Not what happens, but what it’s about.

For example, what happens in Winnie the Pooh is that a bear and his friends survive a flood, throw a birthday party, and search for things (heffalumps, tails, friends, homes.) But what the book is about is learning how to be brave. How to be a friend. How to grow up.

Turns out that a synopsis is just another tool in the writer’s toolbox. It can not only show us if our story has stayed on point, it can direct us if we lose our way. By forcing us to distill our story down, we can look at exactly what our characters are struggling with and if we’ve stayed true to that struggle. We can see if all the pieces of the book are exploring the same questions and leading us towards the same conclusions. Most importantly, we can remember why we wrote the story in the first place.

A synopsis is like a recipe for a delicate, rich, chocolate souffle. Everything in it should be essential and with it you should be able to build something greater and more delicious that the sum of its parts. It should give enough details that you can already taste the cocoa, imagine the texture, and almost smell it baking in the oven. In other words, a good synopsis should make your mouth water.

Bon Appetit!

Posted in Synopsis, Writing

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Missing Piece

October 21st, 2009 by Sara

My family has a tradition of putting together puzzles during the holidays. The wobbly card table comes up from the basement. The furniture’s shuffled around. And in the quiet times between visiting relatives or Christmas shopping, we’ll sneak a cookie and saunter up to the table, idly trying to find a match or two before having to run off somewhere else.

Amazingly, slowly, fantastic pictures of wizards or the vague dots of George Seurat take shape on that table. Until somewhere around New Years, the final piece goes in. A work of art assembled out of cardboard.

Putting together a story is pretty similar. You get all your pieces out there and start moving them around, separating by patterns and colors. In the middle of everything else… doing the dishes, walking the dog, brushing your teeth…you saunter up sideways to whatever muddled ideas are floating around. And pretending like it’s no big deal, you turn them this was and that until, snap, something fits together.

This summer, I got in the holiday mood and bought a card table and a puzzle. I studiously put the border together and then promptly got distracted. And there the puzzle sat, in the middle of the living room for months and months. With dogs bumping the table legs and people putting their bags on it, and general chaos swirling around.

Until… I started revising again. I got some feedback on my novel that was insightful, completely true, and not a little overwhelming. Turns out, my story was close, but it still had holes in it. So, in the middle of trying to figure out how to fix my story, I wandered back to my puzzle.

It was a perfect activity to do while I was thinking about my book. The problem was that the puzzle, like my story, had been sitting there for months with life happening all around it. I was positive that I’d lost a piece of it by now.

And I had.

But what happened with the puzzle was amazingly close to what was happening in my writing life. As I put the puzzle together, lost pieces found their way back to me. A friend, who’d been at my house weeks before, mysteriously found a piece at the bottom of his bag. My husband found another on the floor right before the vacuum ate it.

When the puzzle was about 90% complete, I began to suspect that there was still one piece missing. Friends would look over my shoulder and ask “Where’s that piece?” Because they could see as clearly as I could that there were no more orange pieces left on the table.

“Um…maybe it’s there somewhere,” I’d say, waving vaguely at my ever dwindling pile of pieces.

I kept putting the picture together around it, stomach sinking. Hoping that by sheer force of will the piece would magically appear. Until finally, all the pieces were gone and there was still one gaping hole in the puzzle.

I looked around the table. I scoured the floor. I glared at my dog, who’d probably eaten it. Then in a fit of desperation… I looked in the box. And there, in the corner, was one lone puzzle piece. A smudge of orange that’d never been out on the table in the first place. Something that had been waiting all this time to complete the picture. Snap. It fit into place and there in front of me, with reds and yellows and all the oranges, was a phoenix rising up into the air.

Posted in Revision, Writing

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Better, stronger, faster.

October 14th, 2009 by Sara

This past summer, my beloved puppy dog passed away, leaving a corgi-shaped hole in my life. My husband and I’d had her for almost as long as we’d been a ‘we.’  Together, we’d moved across the country 3 times and lived in 5 different apartments. We’d been camping up in the mountains and out on the beach. And we’d curled up on the couch with hundreds of books. So it was hard to get used to life without her.

Around the same time, I started working on a new book, replacing familiar characters with new ones. Then my computer died, taking some of my writing with it.

It wasn’t until my friend Edith, who I wrote with twice a week, announced she was moving that I recognized everything in my life was shifting. I was not impressed.

Change is hard. And it seems to come all at once, disrupting your schedule, switching the scenery, and upsetting the balance. This is just the way life works. To move forward, life must change. Sad or happy, it’s inevitable. And this is true with writing as well.

Except with writing, we’re inflicting the change on ourselves. We rearrange the furniture. Kill off characters. Add new ones. It’s the nature of revision, but at times I find myself hesitating. What if I mess it up? What if the things that are good about my story get lost?  Sometimes the story seems so close to being right, that it feels risky to change it.

But we have to.

If we want our stories to be everything we’ve imagined them to be in our heads… if I want the chance to share that story with the world… then we have no choice but to step forward. We have to take our story apart and put it back together again, trusting that what we rebuild will be stronger than before.

And the same is true with life. I will always miss my puppy. I will miss Edith and typing away next to her at the coffee shop. I will even miss my computer, bulky and covered with stickers. But as pieces of my life fall away, I have to believe that what is left, that what is coming next, will be strong and beautiful too.

Posted in Not-so-nifty happenings, Revision, SCBWI

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