Another step in the right direction
Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 5:26 PM | Writer's Cramp Progress! My Writerly Pursuits week is underway, and I actually am making some sort of progress on writing-related tasks.
On my agenda for this week, as previously mentioned, are tackling my query letter and synopsis. The former is a single page introduction letter to a potential agent, in which a writer has one or two paragraphs (three at the very most!) to distill the essence of the story and convince the agent to read further (i.e., either the attached synopsis, if they take them in submission, or to request a synopsis or a partial or full manuscript). The query letter is much like the blurb on the back cover a book meant to excite a potential reader into wanting to read the book itself.
It is very intimidating.
So I decided today to help myself get into the groove by instead tackling the synopsis. My idea here is that immersing myself in the story and getting into the mode of distilling it down for a synopsis will help me drill down on the way to sell the story in an even shorter format. Familiarity with the material and alla that. (I mean, obviously I’m familiar with the material since I wrote it, and have read and reread it approximately fifty gajillion times, but you know how it is when you get on a roll working on something, and you you hit that sweet spot of everything just flowing right along…that’s what I’m after.)
The synopsis is, depending on where you look and who you trust, anywhere from a 1 page to a 25 page summary of the main story and characters, including main plot twists and the ending. Kind of a big range, there. (There’s all kinds of contradictory information out there as to how long it should be, in the absence of an express definition in a submission guideline. And submission guidelines vary widely from agent to agent. So.) I’m going to go ahead and write mine up and then edit it down, with a goal of hitting somewhere between 5 and 7 pages. For almost 500 pages of manuscript, that ought to be quite a trick….
But work has begun, and I’m already onto page 3 and feeling quite chuffed with myself. So, as I say, progress is being had. In the course of working today, I wanted to look up a couple of things I remembered saving about synopsis tips in my handy bookmarked “Writing Stuff” folder. Over the last couple of years, I’ve accumulated quite a collection of links on all facets of publishing and writing and whatnot. And I’m pathologically organizational by nature, but as I’ve accumulated more and more links, the initial structure I’d set up and later modified has gotten less and less manageable for all of those links. Finding those tips I wanted took far longer than it should’ve, and I thought to myself, as I have many times in the last few months, that I really need to go through and reorganize the folders I’d set up for them to better reflect the way I’m using that folder now. A bit of a project that I just haven’t had time for, even as I keep adding links and terrific information gets buried under the sheer multitude of what I’ve accumulated. And then I thought “AHA!” Because, after all, that is exactly what this week is all about — taking the time I need to focus strictly on doing things for my writerly pursuits. (No I’m not avoiding that scary query letter. Am not. Am not. Shut up.)
Two hours later, and my pathologically organized self is quite content with my newly restructured “Writing Stuff” folder, with renamed folders and rearranged subfolders and newly-added folders and subfolders and all the inevitable dead links weeded out. Oh, it’s enough to make my little OCD heart to go pitter pat.
Since I know that there are those among you who share either my writing passion or my OCD tendencies (or both!), I thought I’d share the end result. (Note that there are some duplications here, which were intentional, and that this doesn’t constitute everything in my writing universe; there are many blogs/sites that I follow with Bloglines or whatever, and so don’t need to keep bookmarked. And some that I do follow with those other methods that I also have bookmarked, because that’s just how I roll.)
*And for those of you asking yourselves, “Um…why didn’t she just share these via delicious/Google Bookmarks/etc.? Does she not realize this is soooooo Web 1.0**??” Well, boys and girls, doing so would require more than just a simple upload, would in fact require some sort of organizing or cleaning or whatever before and/or after doing so in order to make some sense of the wealth of information contained therein, and as I am currently doing my best to stay on task***, I am indeed opting for a less elegant, more brute force method.
**Also, when did Firefox start adding hidden gobbledygook code to their export bookmarks file? Because holy extraneous code, Batman!
***We will ignore the amount of time I already wasted doing both of those things before giving up realizing that it was going to take way more time than I wanted to spend. In other news, tagging is a great organizational method, but there is still something to be said for the tree system of organizing information. I AM LOOKING AT YOU DELICIOUS.