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How to Write a Synopsis for Your Novel: Overcoming the Disconnect

January 31, 2022

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

book, literature, marketing, publishing, writing

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.

how to write a synopsis
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
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Every Book Is Autobiographical – or Should Be

January 3, 2022

Experiencing, Writing

creativity, experiencing, imagination, literature, memory, writing

(Auto)biographies, autobiographical novels, “based on a true story”… There seem to be many ways of more or less describing the same thing. At least that’s what one may think. However, in actual fact, all these are very different modes of writing, with unique requirements. More importantly, for the purposes of this post, most people seem to ignore a very crucial thing: Every book is autobiographical!

This might feel an obviously wrong thing to say. “Hang on, Chris”, you might think. “How on earth can every book be autobiographical? What about American Psycho, or even some science fiction – say, Solaris? Surely, you’re not claiming that Bret Easton Ellis has killed people or that Stanisław Lem traveled to another planet?”

The answer is – to the best of my knowledge – no. Yet both these two examples, just like every other book ever written by any human is deep down an autobiographical book. The reason?

Because every author, even when writing fiction, puts a piece of themselves in it.

Or at least, they ought to! Because about the only way to fail entirely at writing fiction is to not allow yourself – your subjectivity, your experiences, your flaws and vices and insecurities – to become part of the narrative. Writing an autobiographical book the way I just defined it is the easiest way for any author (and especially so for less experienced ones) to introduce affect in their narratives.

Let’s see why that happens and how to control it.

autobiographical book

When it comes to all books being autobiographical, it’s not out experiences that are important, but remembering and reflecting on our experiences
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Stream of Consciousness Nonfiction: Can It Work?

December 20, 2021

Experiencing

creativity, experience, experiencing, experimental, writing

This will probably be one of the weirdest posts I’ve ever written, but if we don’t try new things how can we challenge ourselves? Without the courage to lose sight of the shore, how can we discover new oceans? This post on whether stream of consciousness nonfiction can work is an example-in-itself.

I decided to give myself a challenge: start writing a post and see how much I can write in the span of thirty minutes. Can stream of consciousness nonfiction work? What will it look like? Is it worth it? Will I stop making silly, self-evident questions and instead proceed with the post itself?

I’ll document my progress as I go along, because I feel this will be the most useful (to you) part of the entire experiment.

stream of consciousness nonfiction
Whenever I don’t have time to think much about an image, I simply add a cat photo. Always works!
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