Template synopses Part III: the sense of an ending - Rowena House

Six weeks into a concentrated period of plotting my PhD novel-in-progress, a psychological drama based on a seventeenth century witch trial, I’ve drawn two main conclusions about using synopsis templates as planning tools.

Firstly, it’s about timing and knowing when to grab that favourite guide off the shelf or open that e-book. Second, and this is related to the first point, it’s about knowing where you most need help.

Example 1: for my debut novel, The Goose Road, synopsis templates – and the planning systems that underpin them – came to my rescue after I’d got a comprehensive rejection email from Andersen Press, a generous analysis of my MA manuscript which proved to be an invaluable editing tool.

An anxious six months later, Walker’s Mara Bergman, a wonderful editor, offered a raft of great suggestions about how to make Angelique’s story publishable.

It was the combination of Andersen’s and Mara’s advice and my own imaginative ‘knowledge’ of the story that got The Goose Road over the publishing line, but only because I’d learnt by then how to order these new elements ‘properly’.

Basically, the templates I needed back then were those that helped me to spot what was missing in the narrative and, as a consequence, why the story flagged.

With the help of James Scott Bell’s Complex Plot Grid from his Plot and Structure guide, for example, I re-wrote the manuscript so it told a staged but linear story, with all its energy and drive focused on Angelique’s journey.

This structural/development edit didn’t create the story, however. Nor did vast amounts of work with plotting systems and template synopses save the umpteen failed book twos I’ve started and discarded since then.

Why, then, have the past six weeks working with template synopses been so exciting?

That’s example 2. 

The plotting systems I’m finding useful now aren’t spotting gaps; they’re talking about overall structure and how to arrive at the best end possible. They work, I think, because two years of research, character building and experimentation with voice have provided a wealth of specific ideas to test out against their templates.

The PhD itself is handling all sorts of other stuff, like why I’m writing this story at all, and what I hope to achieve with it; I’d also delivered to my supervisors an outline for a dual narrative and twin timeframe, which got their thumbs up, before setting out on this current voyage of discovery.

Meanwhile ABBA blogs, plus notes on my Facebook author page, offer a means to analyse my writing processes in a non-judgmental way.

What was missing was the cool professional voice which say, yeah, that’s okay, but that bit sucks.

Enter the story gurus and their synopses. 

Past experience has proved that writing my way into a story is guaranteed to end in a hellish place of confusion and disappointment. Thus, when instinct suggested synopsis templates as a subject for the January ABBA post, I believe that was my subconscious saying, hey, dopey, here’s what you’ve got to do next.

That’s what I mean about timing. Last time I needed help after rejection. This time, before drafting a full manuscript. Next time (if there is one) maybe it will be after a first draft or whenever the brain yells, Stop! You need help, girl. Go find some.

This, I suspect, is why Bell’s Complex Plot Grid didn’t come up trumps this time. I’m asking different questions, and can’t expect answers from the same places (although his Writing Your Novel from the Middle again proved a good cross-reference for other guidance about midpoints).

Story Grid, on the other hand, once re-read in full, simplified a complex structure of time shifts, jump cuts and dual narratives into a logical sequence of external and internal progressions spanning five acts. I had faith it could be done; Shawn Coyne helped me figure out how.

In the past two posts I’ve gone on enough about Jeff Lyons’ plotting systems for anyone to think I’m his PR agent, so I won’t mention him again except to say my fandom extends to shelling out $325 to do his Anatomy of a Premise Line online course. Starting Wednesday. Ye-ha. That’s not to say he is the ultimate guru; it’s just his system is a good fit for the work-in-progress.

Last month I was struggling for a metaphor to describe this process of using templates as test beds for creative ideas. On Twitter, I suggested it’s futile to invent the wheel for each story, so nab someone else’s and give it a spin.

Lately, I’ve stolen another image: a mansion of many rooms. Open each template door and see if you like the layout and décor. If you do, go in and sit awhile, then design your own room.

Or maybe it’s best to stick with Stephen King and his On Writing toolbox. Template synopses are gadgets that help make stories better. When you need one, dip in.

For what it’s worth, at the start of this plotting process I thought I would be ‘nailing the story down’ and wrestling my work into shape. The story itself felt like a force of antagonism I had to get under control.

It’s not been like that in practice. And it’s not been about solving technical questions, either.

Working with plotting systems has been fluid, creative, and energizing. It’s been about opening some doors and closing others. It’s been about making more informed choices about the material I’ve got and finding out where I need more.

Working deliberately and carefully with these guides has also silenced the inner demon that insists planning is procrastination and makes snide remarks about how few words I’ve written. The story will be better for thinking first and writing second. I’m sure of it.

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Facebook: Rowena House Author

Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com

PS I’ll close this series on synopses and plotting now, without, as promised, talking about the OCEAN-based character arc system until I figure out if it’s useful again this time around. ''ll post links to the original ABBA articles about it on my FB author page in case anyone is interested.

Six plotting synopses that are coming my rescue: Part II - Rowena House

Since last month’s post singing the praises of synopsis templates as story development tools I took my own advice and applied the first two I mentioned – Jeff Lyons’ premise line and Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid – to my work-in-progress.

Things didn’t go entirely as expected.

First up, Jeff Lyons has totally overhauled his plotting system since I read about in 2013, so it was his current, more complex, character-based ideas I’ve been exploring rather than the short, plot-based outline I described here last month.

[I have a niggling suspicious that some of us would have liked him to keep the old within the new, but there we go.]

Secondly, I worked out why I couldn’t explain Story Grid succinctly last month: I had misremembered it as an outlining tool, when in fact it is a dynamic structure to guide progressions within a well-developed story idea.

In fact, being unable to fill out the Story Grid’s Act-level boxes for my B-plot proved where I needed more detailed plotting and character development. Gaps in a grid showed where the story had holes. Duh.

 

Anyhow, rather than waffle generically about another three templates as planned, I thought this month I’d fess up and look at what went wrong and what went right – and change the title of this mini-series to the present tense from the past.

Before we get going properly, though, I will say one more thing.

Thus far, I stand by my underlying premise that tried and trustworthy story forms – expressed as synopsis templates – offer pathways into more imaginative content than stumbling into a story more or less blind.

Applying different templates to my draft outline has been super useful in terms of drilling down into the details of the dual plotlines, and a sharp reminder about the amount of plotting I’ve still got to do before embarking on a full draft.

But that’s the point, right? Better to know your map and compass are duff before heading into the woods.

So...

Working with an outline for my B-plot – one which had already established the basic plot and character components of Beth’s storyline – Shawn Coyne’s Foolscap Story Grid suggested her tale fitted best with his internal genre of Redemption.

That in turn gave Beth a Story Value of selfishness versus altruism.

[As mentioned last month, you do have to buy into Coyne’s and McKee’s concepts about Story Value as the engine driving scenes before embarking on this process. Very crudely, the flip from the value to its opposite and back again in every scene maintains energy and suspense.]

Designing scenes and sequences that force Beth to choose between selfish and altruistic outcomes is a clear, dynamic and plot-able driver of dramatic tension, one I doubt would have occurred to me had I (as planned) focussed on her personality profile, or, indeed, on any of the character archetypes out there in writing guru-land.

Thinking about plotting in Coyne’s technical way was also a useful reminder that characters aren’t people and that stories aren’t real life. Yes, a character’s psychology and emotions must be believable and coherent, but a plot is about more than people getting lost in their problems.

When planning this exercise in synopsis templates, it had seemed logical to work sequentially from an outline to a development synopsis, then amalgamate that with a Big Five personality trait-based character arc, plus a classic ‘tent pole’ structural synopsis, to create the necessary ingredients for a long-form narrative synopsis and/or to start writing draft one.

In practice, however, working iteratively with Story Grid and Jeff Lyons’ updated premise line – which now rests heavily on an internal ‘moral’ driver for the protagonist – proved surprisingly productive.

By comparing and contrasting these two systems, and feeding ideas from one to the other, I began to get a feel for how far and how fast they might take the development process, either separately or together, and more importantly how deeply they drew me into the story, the idea being, after all, to use these templates as accelerants of imagination, not cut-and-paste story designs.

Certainly, both systems flagged up areas where more research of fact and imagination are needed. They also demonstrated how important it is to integrate the different story components highlighted when following each process.

Let me explain that last point in a bit more detail.

When planning this post, I tried to think of a metaphor to illustrate what I’m attempting to say about synopses and story development. I imagined someone preparing to prune a bonsai tree, with the plant sitting on a revolving table surrounded by a glass box.

Each synopsis template – outline, development, psychological and structural – represents one side of the box; each one offers a distinct way of viewing the tree.

I intended to suggest the glass box lets us see the whole tree in 3D, and what it might eventually look like before one picked up the secateurs.

Now, however, I’m not sure I like that metaphor.

For one thing, you have to have a tree to start with. That is, a clear outline of the story as a whole. But then we are talking about development tools, so let’s assume that we do have a basic story outline ready to go.

[This is where I think Jeff Lyons’ 2013 Premise Line was really helpful, even if his updated version is more thorough.]

Another problem with the glass box metaphor is its implication that each window onto the tree remains separate when, as noted above, they need to be integrated.

This was brought home when I was reading Jeff Lyons’ Rapid Story Development which builds comprehensively on his updated Anatomy of a Premise Line. 

I like this book at lot. Its moral internal driver and structural design for a strong middle are especially alluring, even though I don’t buy into its commitment to Enneagrams as the answer to (basically all) problems about creating characters.

Ironically, though, studying this comprehensive story development programme alongside Story Grid highlighted an obvious benefit of using multiple plotting templates, i.e. the opportunity for cherry-picking.

For example, Jeff’s moral driver exposed a weakness with my own (much loved) tables for plotting epiphanies based on the Big Five personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

It turns out (sob) that I had been trying to overlay my ‘tent pole’ structural synopsis with a chain of Big Five-related epiphanies which were causally related to key plot points, but not driving them.

That, I now realise, is how I plotted The Goose Road, with Angelique’s staged process of maturation the result of her experiences on her journey. Her character arc was in that sense bolted onto the journey plot.

As Jeff’s analysis identified, that made Angelique reactive to events: she is a passive protagonist. (Argh!) Yes, she decides to take her geese north to save the family farm, but it is the journey that changes her; she doesn’t drive the change herself.

If I want my seventeenth century A-plot protagonist Tom to be truly proactive, to create his own predicaments as well as get himself out of them, his personality must be more central to his tale than Angelique’s was to hers.

Thanks, Jeff. Grrr...

[If your eyes are rolling at this point, bear with. The work-in-progress is based on historical evidence for a witch trial so key events in it are fixed. The challenge is to tell a good yarn that makes the points I want to make without abandoning historical credibility.]

My next plotting task would seem to be to rethink Tom and his Big Five personality profile.

But that’s good, because now I’m not only wondering what epiphanies he will have, which is where I was at the start of the month, I’m also imagining which epiphanies he will resist like fury. In other words, a whole new avenue of imagination has opened up.

By next month – hopefully – I will have more of this stuff worked out, and can move onto other synopsis templates which are helping to develop the story.

Meanwhile, spring is around the corner! Ye-ha. Thank you for reading this far.

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Facebook: Rowena House Author

Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com

Six synopses that came to my rescue when plotting: Part I - Rowena House

As plotting devices go, it’s hard to beat a good synopsis, imho.

Not those last minute, submission synopses, written with a sense of despair that an entire story can ever be squeezed onto an A4 sheet of paper, no matter how narrow the margins.

I mean grabbing one of the many framework templates off the internet, or copying a favourite out of a book, and seeing what inspiration it can offer: how form can shape and enrich content.

If that sounds like cheating, I think of it like this: the content of a story will always be ours – personal, original, specific, owned – whereas form speaks to form, and experts in it are well worth listening to.

Confession 1: I became a bit addicted to template synopses while The Goose Road was out on submission and I no longer had the support of the Bath Spa MA in writing for young people. Rather than cheat-sheets, they helped me think about structure in a structured way. And I do love a good chart! They provide the comforting visual impression that unmanageable flights of imagination can be quantified, nailed down, and made better.

When the development offer for The Goose Road came along from Walker, these types of synopses offered a ready-made set of instructions about how to test the story’s premise, how to map out necessary revisions to the plot and deepen Angelique’s psychological arc, how to track act dynamics and plan scene polarity switches. They also helped me to identify gaps where epiphanies and/or reversals were needed, and monitor dramatic progressions and pace.

With all that objective and possible stuff to do, writer’s block became a bit of an affectation.

I know this sort of approach is anathema for a lot of people. To sceptics, I offer this quote from USA wordsmith, Chuck Wendig:

‘If outlining destroys your writing magic, editing/rewriting is going to f***ing obliterate it. One of the values of outlining is that it gives you a map forward – a fraying rope to reach for and cling to in the long darkness of the writing process. Another value is that it lets you muddle through the mistakes of your story early on – it’s a lot easier to fix a two-three page outline than it is to fix a 300 page novel. I promise.’

Convinced? Or at least willing to read on? If so, here are three of my current favourite synopsis writing techniques which I’m adapting for my historical work-in-progress for adult readers. I’ll take a look at another three next month. 

Jeff Lyons’ Premise Line Template

My notes about this system come from a 2013 article by Jeff Lyons based on his writing guide, Anatomy of A Premise Line.

The article seems to have vanished from Google, but a Kindle edition of the book is still available on Amazon. Personally, I think it’s a cracking method of driving down into the core of a story, and I’m going to buy his book to say thank you for the number of times I’ve found it invaluable as a writer, mentor and editor.

Lyons recommends establishing the story’s core structure first, then refine it into a solid premise line (or elevator pitch) before writing the book. Personally, I find his template invaluable mid-development, too.

For my PhD manuscript, I’m trusting to a creative instinct that an episode from the past which has nagged at me for well over a decade must have something to say. Transforming this instinct into a commercial premise line a la Jeff Lyons is part of the discovery process.

Lyons’ template is extremely practical. It also takes an exact form: that is, a story must be able to conform to this outline:

‘When an event sparks a character to action, that character acts with deliberate purpose until that action is opposed by an external force, leading to some [life altering] conclusion.’

I’ve added the life altering bit to this direct quote, but it’s there in the back-up text.

Basically, if the core elements of your outline cannot be mapped onto the template, then you don’t (yet) have a story; you have a situation.

To develop your situation into a story, you have to drill down into each clause of the template sentence, and provide specifics to describe the protagonist and their situation, what sparks them to act, what exactly their goal is, plus the nature of the forces of antagonism ranged against them, and the story’s conclusion.

I won’t steal his thunder by going into detail about his techniques for arriving at a blisteringly good story outline, but here is his worked example of a premise line for Peter Benchley’s Jaws:

‘When a fish-out-of-water, big-city cop moves to a small, coastal town dependent on tourism, he must team up with an oceanographer and a crusty sailor to convince the doubting, money-grubbing townsfolk to close their beaches because a giant, man-eating shark is lurking just offshore, until the shark strikes, forcing the townsfolk to allow the cop and his buddies to take on the shark mano-a-mano.’

Here’s mine for Dora Greenfield’s plotline in Iris Murdoch’s The Bell:

‘When a scatter-brained, bullied wife returns to her academic husband at work at a religious community which serves the Benedictine nuns of a Gloucestershire Abbey, she secretly plots with a young fellow guest to recover a legendary bell from the Abbey’s lake in defiance of the community’s narrow-minded moral code. The community breaks apart in the aftermath of their antics, freeing her from her incandescent husband.’

Having drafted a premise line for Beth Knyvet, co-protagonist in my work-in-progress, I have discovered one problem with Lyons’ system: I’m now so keen on her story I want it to be the A plot, not a subplot!

Story Grid Foolscap Template

Of all the step-by-step analytical frameworks for a full storyline from the big guns of film and TV scriptwriting, Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid Foolscap Template is one I am returning to for the WIP for its dynamism and (apparent) simplicity.

To use it you have to buy into the notion of Story Values and polarity switches as plot drivers (from happy to sad, for example, alive to dead, afraid/brave, in prison/free etc.) and also spend time studying his ideas before the downloadable template makes sense, but if you’re a fan of Robert McKee a lot of the basics will be familiar.

Thinking about Story Grid for this blog, I believe the difference between it and many other whole-story templates – and here Christopher Vogel’s Writer’s Journey circular chart and John Yorke’s five-act table spring to mind – is the stress Coyne places from the outset on change and progression.

It seems there is limitless advice out there about story beats and structural plot points (the infamous inciting incidents, calls to adventure, midpoints, crises and climaxes) but once you know the function of these beats, it’s more helpful (to my mind at least) to delve into how to deliver them, rather than making up endless permutations on the basic model.

I’m going to have to read back into Story Grid carefully as my optimism that I could provide a potted version of it within the time I have available to write this blog proved illusory, and I don’t want to confuse anyone, including myself, as it is a thought-provoking and worthwhile exercise to apply Coyne’s methods to a story outline.

Its richness can be accessed here: www.storygrid.com

 

Long-form narrative synopsis

This is the opposite form of synopsis to Lyons’ one or two sentence premise line. It is a chronicle of the whole story, with the chains of causation that lead to structural high points described and analysed.

This depth of analysis allows the writer to delve into the thematic significance of major plot points, and to make sure the linkages between character-led actions and the protagonist’s psychological development/epiphanies are logical and progressively more dramatic.

Gaps and inconsistencies jump out of the text if you’re being honest with yourself at this level; there’s no place for weak plot devices to hide.

You can divide a narrative synopsis however you like. I prefer acts as divisions to keep the big picture in mind. If you’re summarizing a completed manuscript from the perspective of chapters, Darcy Patterson’s Novel Metamorphosis two-sentences per chapter tabular system still works best for me. Thanks, as always, to BookBoundUK for this recommendation.

For works-in-progress, it is well worth keeping each iteration of a narrative synopsis on file in case a brilliant new idea turns out to be nonsense; an earlier version can then come to the rescue.

Personally, I let narrative synopses expand to whatever length they need to be. They’re working documents which can be edited down to one or two pages later, depending on an agent’s or editor’s submission requirements.

Confession 2: as a writer, this is the development stage where my stories go to die.

My synopses folder contains half a dozen titles abandoned after a thorough narrative synopsis, mostly because I discovered that I did not believe in them enough to commit years of my life to writing them. Others are left festering there from the days when I was desperate to get Book Two published, but repeatedly hit an external brick wall.

With hindsight, this was an okay point to say goodbye to most of these ideas, even if it hurt at the time. Better to let something go than waste time pumping its weakly fluttering heart.

The exception is a World War I novel set in German-occupied eastern France which I still believe in and regret spiking because my then publisher didn’t want it, not least (I imagine) because anyone could tell the market for WW1 fiction was saturated by 2018.

One day I might go back to it; a lot of its energy is still stored in its various synopses.

Next month I’ll look at three more types of synopses currently being co-opted into service for the work-in-progress: James Scott Bell’s Complex Plot Grid, my own OCEAN psychological profiling table, and the classic structural ‘tent pole’ technique. If I’ve remembered by then why Story Grid is so brilliant I’ll add that too!

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear about your favourite plotting systems. And good reasons to hate synopses. Either way, hope you have fun with your New Year writing. 

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Website: www.rowenahouse.wordpress.com

Facebook: Rowena House Author

Writing a Synopsis Before you Start your Story by Tamsin Cooke

I am one of those unusual people who like writing a synopsis. I didn’t use to. I hated it as much as I hate marmite (which is a lot!). How can you cram the plot points, the twists and turns, the character arcs and the themes in one side of A4? I devoured websites explaining how to do it.

Then one day, I had an idea for a brand-new story. Hoping to pitch it to my agent, I scribbled it down. And a synopsis was born.

 

It was easy and natural to write.  Because I hadn’t thought about any secondary characters yet, I simply included the protagonist’s journey. I worked out what her internal and external goals were and how she was going to achieve them. And I didn’t get bogged down with worrying about which plot points to include since I only knew the major turning events. I showed the conflict that drove the book forward and revealed an exciting ending. And in very simple terms, I described what my character had learnt and how her feelings had changed. I had a character arc!

This synopsis proved incredibly useful when I was writing the actual story. I referred to it, ensuring I was keeping to the essence of my story. I didn’t lose track of my character’s goals and I made sure her motivations matched her decisions. 

 

Now of course, it was just a plan. And the story changed as new ideas came. My protagonist  took me on different journeys and introduced me to new characters.  But the spine and heart of the story remained the same. After the book was written, I edited the synopsis.

Since then, I always write a one- or two-page synopsis before I begin. It keeps me on track, giving me a foundation. Plus I have something to work with when I’ve written the actual book, so I’m not pulling my hair our wrestling what to include.

Tamsin Cooke

Author of The Scarlet Files Series and Stunt Double Series

Website: tamsincooke.co.uk

Twitter: @TamsinCooke1 

 

Synopsis as Friend by Tracy Alexander

 As I contemplated cracking on with my novel this morning – I’m only on Chapter Three – I had a comforting thought. The exact words in my head were Synopsis as friend. My mind’s circuitry led me straight to a case study from my long gone life as a marketer. The subject was dog food.

For ten years I was a proper PAYE employee, selling the likes of frozen food, tennis shoes and booze. For the next ten years I was freelance, selling money in the form of mortgages and investments. At some point I was invited to give a guest lecture at the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Given that I was seven months pregnant, I probably should have declined. Instead I pulled on a pair of black trousers with an oh-so-attractive stretchy panel fetchingly topped by an elastic waistband (for that little known waist that is in fact directly beneath your breasts), buttoned the matching black maternity waistcoat (what joker thought of that) and drove to Cookham.

I wasn’t nervous, until I opened my mouth and realised that my lung capacity, whilst adequate for conversations where you only have every other turn and the person is close by, wasn’t up to the job. I cut short my introduction, offering the delegates a chance to say a little about themselves while I recovered my composure.

My subject was segmentation. Bread and butter stuff. I had all sorts of examples from the world known as FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), from retail and from financial services. All I had to do was teach the theory, show examples – the brilliant dog food slides were ready and waiting – and then relate it to the fields they were working in. I could do that with or without oxygen.

The first attendee mumbled her name and said that she worked on treated mosquito nets. My mind gave a sarcastic ‘yippee!’ Never mind. The others were bound to be working on cars, shampoo, biscuits . . . something I could relate to.

The conch was passed round the room. My confidence ebbed. My smile became as fixed and unresponsive as my twenty-something pupils.

It turned out that I had a global monopoly on marketers of mosquito related products.

Inside I did the equivalent of a refusal at Becher’s Brook.           

Whether it was the peppering of the content with irritating little breaths, the hideousness of my maternity waistcoat or my lack of engagement with the mosquito market, by the time I got to the segmentation of the dog food market, I’d lost them. A shame, because it was my favourite part.

Here’s the gist:

Categorising dog food in terms of form – dry, wet, raw – or flavour – lamb, rabbit, chicken – didn’t help marketers understand how to make their products attractive to dog owners. Nor did using the breed, age or size of dog. Research showed that the most meaningful way of sorting the market was by looking at how dog owners thought about their dogs.

Four segments were identified that most influenced the type of dog food chosen:

Dog as grandchild – indulgence

Dog as child – love

Dog as friend – health and nutrition

Dog as dog – cheap and convenient.

My audience woke up slightly. Proof that a pet can always be relied on to liven things up, be it in business or school visits. We had our first interaction of any length, a welcome reprieve for my pulmonary gas exchange. The treated net marketers had never considered the relationship between dog and master.

Had they not read The Call of the Wild? Seen Bill Sykes mistreat Bull’s Eye?  Or Hagrid berate cowardly Fang? Timmy was surely as much a friend as Anne, Dick, Julian and George. 

They eagerly volunteered product names and quickly slotted them into the four segments.

Cesar Mini Fillets in a foil tray – Dog as grandchild

Asda Smartprice Dog Meal. – Dog as dog

Pedigree Chum Chicken – the clues in the name . . .

In what was overall a pretty grey-with-clouds lecture, I enjoyed the little spell of sunshine. Motivation wasn’t something mosquito experts thought a lot about. They thought about geography and insects and shelter and disease and mosquito net fixing kits. They didn’t think about what might be on the mind of the traveller, setting off alone to try and find traces of the Hairy-nosed Otter in Borneo, or maybe the traveller’s nervous father, buying the very best treated mosquito net for his passionate but impractical son.

Marketers often end up segmenting by demographics e.g. age, gender, income, despite the power of psychographics like motivation, personality and attitude. Perhaps writers should lecture at the Chartered Institute of Marketing instead . . .

Quite why my inner voice chose the words Synopsis as friend, inextricably linked in my hippocampus to Dog as friend, who knows, but it made me reflect on my changed relationship with synopses.

My first few books grew in a free spirit sort of way, meandering towards a vague nirvana shrouded in uncertainty. The synopses written afterwards, if at all. 

This was: Synopsis as bureaucrat.

My new book, Hacked, out in November, was the product of a synopsis I HAD to write because the publisher, Piccadilly Press, was interested in an idea I’d mooted and wanted it fleshed out.

This was: Synopsis as unwanted dependant.

I developed the beginning, middle and end of the story, my lovely publisher made a few suggestions and then I forgot about the four-page plan until there was a problem, at which point I reluctantly referred to it.

The synopsis for the sequel, however, is printed out and has its own space on my desk. It feels reassuring. Trustworthy, but not prescriptive. 

857 words in, with 50 000 ish to go, I’m glad that I’m not alone.

This is: Synopsis as friend

I even enjoyed the discipline of writing it.

  

Tracy Alexander

www.tmalexander.co.uk

The Many Might-Have-Beens of Children's Books

In the last week, I’ve been asked to write some text for a book about stately homes and another one retelling Shakespeare plays for children. The publishers will use the texts I’ve written to create sample spreads, which they’ll take to book fairs to try to drum up interest from foreign publishers. I sincerely hope both will turn into books one day, but I’m not holding my breath. I know from experience that many of these ‘trial balloons’ float off into the Bologna sunset never to be seen again.

©The Salariya Book Co
Publishers selling foreign rights using sample material.
But what happens to the sample material?

Over the years I’ve probably written a couple of dozen sample spreads, and in my editing days I’ve commissioned a good deal more. A LOT of work goes into the writing, the artwork and the design. They’ve got to be representative of the proposed book, but also a bit more than that. Like a Facebook profile, the sample spread has got to show off its product in the best possible light – it’s got to be more colourful, more lively, more eye-catching than the book it’s selling could ever hope to be.

Some are quite gorgeous to look at and read. Yet their readership is tiny, and the ultimate destiny of many, if not most, will be the dusty corner of an editor’s hard drive. If I ever looked back at all the many books and series that didn’t make it past that stage, I could end up feeling quite depressed – so I try hard not to. The same cannot be said for my fiction, however…

The world of fiction has its equivalent of the sample spread: the synopsis and sample chapter. Of course it’s the author who’s usually the initiator here, and the ‘customer’ is an agent or publisher, but the same principles apply. Of the many fiction projects I’ve pitched, some were rejected and others were accepted but changed beyond recognition.

A few, luckily, ended up as published books – but, funnily enough, I find I think less about them than the ones that didn’t make it. They’re my unborn children, frozen at an early stage of development. They’re the flowers in my garden whose buds got broken off – little packages of potential that will never be anything more.

Maybe that’s why they’re interesting. As pure potential, they exist in a place unsullied by the compromises and ineptitudes that are part and parcel of the publishing business. They’re still perfect. And I’m free to wonder how the world might have taken to those characters, those stories, had they ever seen the light of day.

© Hodder & Stoughton
In Fforde's novel, 'Dark Reading Matter' is an alternative dimension
where unrealised fictional characters enjoy a kind of existence.
Is this every author's dream – or nightmare?

In his novel The Woman Who Died A Lot, Jasper Fforde introduced the concept of Dark Reading Matter, a place where all these unrealised imagined worlds congregate: characters from works long out of print co-mingle with those from as-yet-unpublished works. It’s an exotic idea. And it’s exciting to think that it exists – sort of – in the dusty corners of editors’ hard drives the world over.