When You're Reading to an Empty Room

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How to Write a Terrific Synopsis

This wasn't exactly the shot I was going for, but I love how the photo captures the luminous autumn light we get this time of year.

Every time I see the word "terrific," I think of the Charlotte's Web animated movie, where the goose spells it "T, double-E, double-R, double-I, double-F, double-I, double-CCC." I actually futzed with that title a bit, trying to choose the best adjective. Because, who am I kidding? Most of us are shooting for the stars by going for an adequate synopsis. Or any synopsis at all.

For those unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, I mean a synopsis for a novel (or novella). They are the bane of most writers' lives and even multi-published career authors are often required to create them. They're a royal pain. When asked to synopsize their novel in a few pages, the typical writer will respond, "If I could do that, I wouldn't have had to write 100,000 words in the first place."

Yes, the synopsis is an evil construct of the publishing industry.

But it's also a necessary evil.

Synopses are used at many stages of a book's lifetime. They're used by artists to create covers, by publicity people to plan marketing, by foreign rights agents to sell to new publishers. This is why the adequate-, or any-at-all synopsis really isn't good enough.

It needs to shine.

A synopsis should be so terrific that it wows the judges and saves your bacon from a dismal fate.

(See what I did there? Hee hee hee.)

So this week will be all tips and tricks from the Word Whores on synopsis writing. I'm hoping to learn a few things, myself! For myself, I'm going to share a tip I learned just a week ago from the savvy and delightful Melissa Cutler. She gives a workshop on synopsis-writing, called The Total Package, that I highly recommend. I can't recapitulate her entire workshop, but I can share my key takeaway.

It was, at the risk of overstating, revelatory.

The reason so many writers hate writing synopses, Melissa says, is that we think we're supposed to recapitulate the plot. Yes. Yes, that is what I thought. And, of course, that's terribly boring. When you synopsize a plot, it ends up sounding like "and then, and then, and then." Get an eight-year-old to tell you about their favorite movie and feel how your eyes roll up in your head within thirty seconds. Yeah - that.

BUT!

Melissa says this is wrong-headed. Instead, a synopsis should talk about the character arc. It should focus on who the characters are, what they try to get, what gets in the way and how they struggle and eventually change.

I hope some of you are nodding along, lightbulbs going off in your writerly heads. That sure happened for me. I'm going to try this approach on the very next synopsis I write. For once I don't dread the prospect.

(Though I might bribe Melissa with cupcakes to read it for me.)

Three Ways to Put More Emotion on the Page

I snapped this pic yesterday for a Happy Caturday flash giveaway of a friend's book. It's the good life around here. :-)

So this week's topic is Putting Emotion on the Page - A How To. Pretty baldy stated, huh? No meandering about with theory or anecdotes. Nope - the calendar demands a How To and thus we must step up and deliver. I'm really looking forward to the posts from the other Word Whores.

Because I feel like I'm not very good at this.

A lot of it comes from my INTJ nature. (If you're not familiar with that Meyers-Briggs personality designation, INTJ is here.) The TL:DR upshot is that I'm a rational thinker and judger, rather a feeler and perceiver. If you did read that page, you will have seen how many times they mention that INTJ's are not naturally good at expressing themselves or explaining their non-linear thought processes.

(Hoo boy! I'd forgotten the bit about non-linear thought processes. This explains SO much about my writing process and why I can't pre-plot to save my life.)

In line with this, it was difficult for me, when I first began writing fiction, to get emotion on the page. I'm firstly more a fan of rationality over emotion, and secondly not that great at communicating the emotion I do believe in.

That said, I think I've gotten better at this. Reviews on my recent books say things like "this book is as touching as it is torrid" and "swooningly romantic."

So here are three things I've learned to put more emotion on the page

1) All emotion is emotion

I learned this from Sarah MacLean's workshop at RWA National. She said that if you can get your readers to feel one emotion, that opens the door to them feeling all the emotions. This was totally a Eureka! moment for me and I've found it's really true. More, it's so much easier to start the story with emotions like humor or anger and let those pave the way to the deeper, squishier and trickier emotions like love and desire.

2) Steal from the poets

The language of emotion is not the language of rationality. There's no room for complete sentences and rigid prose when conveying emotion. Instead, access poetic devices like cadence and assonance to create a mood that echoes the characters' emotional states. Pay particular attention to word choice in very emotional scenes. In writing novels, we frequently can't dwell on every word and phrase like the poets can, with their shorter works, but we can in certain scenes. Word choice - the sound, resonance, and assonance - plays into creating that feel.

3) Reach for the metaphor

A lot of emotional language has become cliché - partly because emotions ARE so difficult to put into words. We run to the typical metaphor - I love you with all my heart, weeping as if her heart would break, so angry she sees red - because those are shortcuts to describe huge emotions that defy easy description. When I'm tempted to use a cliché, I take that as a sign that something enormous lurks beneath that I'm trying to gloss. On those occasions, whether in drafting or going back over to revise, I try to dig deep for my own description. What does it feel like to ME in those moments? Whatever comes to me, that's what I go for, no matter how unusual or bizarre. It's about the poetry, not the rationality.

Anyone else have good tips to share?

Secret Tricks for Optimizing Research

Tomorrow sees the release of Under His Touch, one of my contemporary erotic romances. The lovely ladies at That's What I'm Talking About are hosting a Sunday Snippet from the book, if you care to check it out. It's one of my favorite scenes in the book, when my very correct Brit hero just can't quite stop himself from touching the heroine. A chaste caress, but oh, so fraught.

My favorite thing!

Okay, one of my favorite things...

This week's topic at the Bordello is Research Tips and Tricks.

I want to tell you guys what I tell everyone when they ask me about doing research - that I write what I do because I can make things up and don't have to do research!

Seriously, this is why I don't write historical anything.

That said, I did go to a fancee college where I learned to use a research library. Because I double-majored in biology and religious studies, I became adept at finding both cutting edge scientific data and obscure old mystical texts. And loved it all. In grad school, I began to do my own research, which developed another set of skills.

Of course, this was all back in the days before the military-industrial complex developed the Internet, which was then swiftly appropriated by free-thinkers the world over, in one of my favorite bits of irony.

See? I have a lot of favorite things.

It's pretty amazing. I wrote a novel five years ago that I adapted Sanskrit words for to create the world, which means I used this ginormous Sanskrit dictionary - four inches thick and not in alphabetical order. It's a giant PITA to use. I never sold this novel, but I recently adapted it for another go at the market. This time I discovered an ONLINE SANSKRIT DICTIONARY. I cannot rhapsodize enough on how ever-so-much easier this is to use.

So, that's my tip. Use the ever-loving Internet.

Save the dictionary links, learn how to improve your Google-fu with specific searches, know which are the good research site, donate to http://www.wikipedia.org/ because they're awesome. And I'll give you one more.

Twitter.

I know, I know - I'm always going on about Twitter. But the Twitter hive-mind LOVES questions. You can throw a question out on the waters and someone will answer. It's amazing. It helps if you have a fair number of followers, but you can always add "Please RT" and people will pass it along. Best reason ever to build followers.

For example, when writing Under His Touch, I asked Twitter if it would be reasonable for a man in New York City to go out on a Sunday morning and buy a high end hairbrush from a place nearby. Not only did an NYC gal answer, she even wanted to drill down to what neighborhood he'd live in and where he might go.

(The answer was yes.)

So there you have it. Go forth and retrieve that information!