I love writing a synopsis. There, I said it out loud.
Hard to believe, right? It is excruciatingly difficult to take 90,000+ words and distill them into three or four hundred, or less, and still keep what remains sufficiently interesting. There is a famous quote by Mark Twain and others, which I will here bastardize: I didn’t have time to write a synopsis so I wrote a novel instead.
Writing a Synopsis is not just work, more like like murder. All your secondary plot lines are disappeared with a stroke of the delete key. Vital supporting characters cease to exist. Subtlety and nuance? Vaporized. All the ingredients you had cooked together for readers to feast upon are sucked away: Your seven-course meal of delight reduced to a common bowl half full of watery soup.
But hey, some people like bouillabaisse. And now, I realize, I do too. Hmm, maybe I’m having a cognitive dissonance moment, a Stockholm syndrome thing where, having been captive and put through hell, I’m in love with the devil now. Continue reading “Synopsis: Hell or Just Purgatory?”