Writing a Synopsis: What 245 Listings Show

Every listing the Harris Literary Agency published carried a block headed About the book. Those blocks were the compressed form of the manuscript: the one-page description and the two-to-five-page synopsis that the agency's guidelines asked authors for, trimmed again for the web. The archive holds 245 of them, from paragraphs of about 80 words to summaries that run past a thousand words. The good ones share three things, the weak ones go wrong in a small number of recognisable ways, and the difference is nearly always visible in the first two sentences.

Protagonist, stakes, turn

A synopsis has to carry a person, what that person stands to lose, and the point at which the story changes direction. Everything else is optional. The shortest listings in the catalog show this because they have no room for anything else.

Suzanne Blaney's description of So The River Flows is 89 words long. Jennifer Todd flees a violent first marriage to Paris before the Second World War; the German invasion traps her there and costs her a new love; she escapes to America, buries her feelings in a Hollywood career, and on a post-war assignment in Europe learns the truth about the man she lost. Person, pressure, turn, and even a hint of the resolution, in four movements. Nothing about the book's themes, nothing about its market, no adjectives applied to the writing.

Joseph McDade's description of Suzanne at the Window is shorter still, 83 words, and does something the agency's guidelines explicitly asked for: it gives the ending. A community college instructor assigned to teach English to a high school class falls into a triangle with his star pupil and the girl they both want. The last sentence reads, "In the end, Donald loses Suzanne, his pride, his sobriety, and very nearly his job." That is the whole arc, and an agent reading it knows exactly what kind of book is being offered and how it lands.

The clearest statement of the principle comes from a non-fiction listing. Bert Gottlieb and Thomas J. Mawn's description of The Men's Club begins: "The plot of 'The Men's Club' is simple: the writer discovers he has prostate cancer, has it removed, survives, is left incontinent, but is eventually cured. End of story. Except in the telling, which is unusual for this subject." The authors separate the plot from the telling in three sentences and then spend the rest of the page on the telling, a patient's voice alternating with his urologist's. Plot first, briefly; method second, at length. Most synopses in the catalog would be better for that order.

How the longer ones are built

The agency asked for a synopsis of two to five pages that told the entire story in greater detail than the description, and several listings preserve that longer form.

The listing for Lockhart's memoir Some Other Joy is the most explicit. It is divided under four labels, Setting, Characters, Conflict and Resolution, and fills each in turn: Dallas in 1986 over six months; a twelve-year-old narrator writing a journal at a psychologist's request, her mother newly diagnosed with what the listing calls Multiple Personality Disorder, a grandmother forced to seek custody; the kidnapping, the night in a dumpster, the custody petition; and the resolution, the child's admission that she lied about fearing her father and her return to his home. The labels would not survive into a finished query, but as a drafting scaffold they are hard to improve on, because they force the writer to answer the question an agent asks silently: and then what happened?

Paul Mark Tag's description of Category 5 takes the other common route and simply tells the story in order, from a Navy meteorologist's suspicion of his old college roommate, through the roommate's funding by a shadowy group and the plan to steer a hurricane up Chesapeake Bay, past two attempts on the meteorologist's life, to a final flight into Bermuda to stop it. It is a chronological synopsis, and it follows the plot all the way to the final confrontation, though it stops short of saying how that confrontation ends. The archive's own card for the listing reduces all this to a single line about a meteorologist who suspects his roommate of controlling storms with a satellite laser.

A few listings also do what the guidelines asked and state the length up front. John Rauenhorst's description of Force of Will opens by calling it an 80,000-word, 271-page action-adventure novel; K.R. Levin's The Kids from Folden announces itself as a 56,000-word science fiction novel for the young adult market. It reads oddly to a visitor, but it answered a question the agency had asked.

The shape underneath all of these is the one teachers ask for in a narrative essay: a person in a situation, an event that disturbs it, a sequence of consequences, and a change in the person by the end. A synopsis is that shape applied to a book, which happens to be your own. If a draft cannot be read as a narrative in its own right, with its own beginning and end, it is probably a list of scenes rather than a synopsis.

Where the weak ones go wrong

The catalog's weaker descriptions are not weak because the books were. They are weak in ways that recur, and the agency's guidelines named most of them in advance.

• Selling before telling. One suspense listing says, before it has introduced a single character, that the combination of its two themes makes the book "marketable to all readers of commercial fiction." The guidelines' instruction was to tell what the work is about and not add hype. A reader is not persuaded by a claim about readers.
• Adjectives in place of events. One listing spends its first sentence calling the book powerful and heart-moving and its closing paragraph calling it inspired, tangible, touching and purposeful; the phone call, the murder trial and the family's collapse sit in between, and would carry the page alone. Put the events first and the adjectives become unnecessary.
• A world with no one in it. Joe Power's description of In the Area of Gray is 85 words of setting, a government sector that operates on two levels, and names no character at all. The reader finishes knowing the atmosphere and not the story.
• Numbers first. Two non-fiction listings open with a paragraph of figures, about stress and divorce in one case and foster care in the other, before saying what the book does. Figures can support a synopsis; they cannot replace its first sentence.
• Stopping at the cliffhanger. The description of The Hohmann Transfer leaves its astronaut alone in a destroyed shuttle with the words "She must think fast or die..." It is a fine jacket line, and the opposite of what the guidelines asked for, which was the ending.
• Opening with the manuscript's first paragraph. Brian Dorner's description of A Cure by Death quotes the novel's opening lines, says "Thus begins," and proceeds. This works when the lines are good, as they are there, and fails when they are not, because it hands the agent a reason to stop before the synopsis has started.

None of these is fatal. Each is a draft that stopped one revision early.

Revising for clarity

The agency's page said two things about the writing itself: "Make sure it is clear and succinct," and, of the sample pages, "Your editing skills will be scrutinized." Both apply to the synopsis, which is the first piece of an author's prose an agent reads with full attention. A practical revision pass looks something like this.

Name the protagonist in the first sentence, by name, with one identifying fact. Make the second sentence the disturbance. Then write one sentence per turn in the story, in order, and no sentences about scenes that do not turn anything. Give the ending in plain words. Then go back and strike every adjective that describes the book rather than something in it, every claim about who will buy it, and every question addressed to the reader.

It helps to have a second pair of eyes, and if no reader is available, a draft can be put through a clarity checker to flag sentences that have grown too long to hold, repeated words, and passages where the subject disappears. The final test is human. Hand the page to someone who has not read the manuscript and ask them to say who the book is about, what that person wants, and what stands in the way. If they can, the synopsis works. If they start their answer with "it's sort of about," it does not yet.

What the archive's own cards add

When this archive was built, its editors wrote a one-line card for each of the 245 listings, drawn only from the agency's text. Doing that 245 times is its own lesson in compression. Fran Abram's Inside Out, which the author's description introduces as a story of both character and action, becomes a card about an accountant in Washington who helps an FBI agent investigate her employer's money laundering. The card is shorter, not better, and the shortening shows where the description's weight sat. Most synopses have such a sentence buried in them. The revision job is to find it and move it to the top, which is where the agency's guidelines, in their plain way, always wanted it.