13 January 2012

Small is Beautiful

Before querying publishers and agents about Lives Interrupted, I spent a huge number of hours over numerous weeks (get the idea!) working on my covering letter and synopsis.  I read everything I could find on 'how to' and my initial draft was way too long.  Gradually I whittled it down to the appropriate length. 
Writing the synopsis was harder than writing the novel.
Deciding to publish Lives Interrupted myself had nothing to do with the difficulty of writing a synopsis, but I do admit to a brief, 'Yay that's one job I don't need to do now.'
BUT there's that back cover blurb.
Distilling all those amazing characters, exciting plot twists, and incredible final page twist down to approximately 200 words is hard.  I think I could fill up my hard drive with the versions I played around with - okay maybe a slight exaggeration.
Here is an interesting talk on the subject of summarising TED talks in 6 words.  I'm not sure I'm any closer to finding an easy way to write a killer synopsis or book blurb, but it's a great talk.  Maybe I could plug my novel into the software Sebastian Wernicke used and get a book burb out of that.  Though I guess nothing in life can be that easy.

2 comments:

  1. Nicola Morgan, whose blog I discovered through you, has her how to write a synopsis ebook out. Only 90p until the end of January. I'm buying it!

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    1. I've got a couple of Nicola's books. I like her writing style and find her advice very useful.

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