Not counting a collection of short stories I recently wrote, The Perfect Gray is my most recent literary work. It’s a literary-fiction novel dealing with concepts such as conflicting emotions, empowerment, impossible choices, and risks. The book’s protagonist, Hecate, is basically carried through life like seaweed on the surf, coming and going without a destination of her own, until she meets a strange man. But what does all this have to do with books and music?
More still, as the subtitle reveals, why did I bother making a post-rock album for The Perfect Gray?
The quick answer is, because I wanted. The more elaborate answer is, because art is complex.
This is the cover of Hecate’s Dream, the post-rock album inspired by The Perfect Gray(more…)
This post continues – after quite some time – the “Authors Talk” series. You can think of it as an author interview and, indeed, that is the name of the blog category. However, I prefer to see it as a friendly chat between fellow authors. Today I’m having this virtual discussion with David Maxwell, author of The Drift. A list of useful links to David’s work can be found at the end of this post.
David Maxwell’s The Driftis a dystopian science fiction thriller(more…)
As a writer, I’ve had to write a synopsis for every novel I’ve written. Some of them were written for a literary agent or publisher and were lengthy, others were just a blurb meant to explain what the book was about. In any case, I had to find a way to drastically condense the narrative so that it would fit the given spatial constraints.
I bet you’ve been there yourself, as a writer.
You’ve struggled, perhaps even agonized for hours, days, weeks trying to come up with the perfect text that would summarize your novel. So, here’s a little secret:
It’s impossible.
Nobody can ever fit a narrative requiring the length of a novel in a paragraph, page, or even ten pages. If that were the case, it’s self-evident that the novel wouldn’t exist. Why writing 80,000 words when you can express the same thing in 1000?
The reason a synopsis can never be perfect is based on this. However, with this out of the way, we could perhaps rephrase the question and ask: How to write a synopsis for a novel, making it the best it can be?
This is the topic of today’s post. As the title suggests, in order to learn how to write a synopsis for a novel – in a way that serves its purpose – we must learn how to overcome a certain disconnect; a paradox, caused by the inherent nature of a novel.
This image would be a bad response to the question “what is a boat?” but a great one to the question “what does it feel like to be sailing at sunset?” To understand how to write a synopsis for your novel, you must first understand that a synopsis is not a “short version” of the book(more…)
