ahream

The dirtiest word in the writer’s world is SYNOPSIS. I know novelists that would rather write a whole other book than one measly synopsis. Mention in their company that you are in the midst of the dreaded hell beast, and someone is sure to buy you a drink just on principle.

(It’s clichéd but true that writers congregate in bars. Probably lots of other professions, too, but they’ll have to get their own cliché.)

Make mine an apple martini.

A synopsis, required by many agents, is the entire plot of your novel boiled down to a handful of pages. You must leave out nothing important. You must flesh out your characters, not skimp on the pacing and convey the tone and voice of the full manuscript. And if you write mysteries like I do, you better not leave out any of the clues either, lest the agent think you a dunderhead. Did I mention all of this in just a “few pages?” “Few” being a nebulous and ill-defined term that you’ll never really understand unless you screw up, which leads us back to the dunderhead thing.

Worst of all, I write humorous mysteries, and if you’re going to say you write humor, you darn well better be able to back that up. So add a few of those boob jokes to my word count while you’re at it.

(I’m still waiting on that martini.)

It’s not that I don’t understand the purpose of the synopsis. I do. Agents have a lot of stuff to read. Who wouldn’t want the Cliff Notes? But just this once, can’t they make an exception?

No, no. Hear me out. How about a clean page with just the words, “It’s fantastic. You’re going to love it. Trust me. There’s even a dog.”

No?

I didn’t think so.

Hell, where’s my damn martini?

ahream Dispatches from the City of Angels I'm a mystery writer living in and writing about Los Angeles. You can catch my short story, "Running Venice," in the new anthology LAndmarked for Murder. Look for it in bookstores and on Amazon.com now. In the meantime, feel free to poke around. Over at my website you can find even more blog entries than I could fit here, as well as a few other ramblings. Enjoy and come back often.
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