In Short: Write a Great Synopsis with Nicola Morgan

I've been hanging out at Nicola Morgan's excellent Help! I Need a Publisher blog like a dissolute Barfly at for two years now. Whilst I most definitely don't want a publisher (whether I need one or not may be another matter altogether, of course, but I am very happy without one), I do find it a fabulous place to meet people, share gossip, and learn from the ever-excellent Crabbit Old Bat, whose advice is always to the point and eminently wise. It is, therefore, an absolute delight to be part of the blog tour for her new and incredibly useful book Write a Great Synopsis - An Expert Guide. And an extra special announcement is that Nicola will be in Oxford tomorrow for a workshop in Blackwell's (details here).

Before I go any further I should explain that there is a fabulous competition going on alongside this. In Nicola's words:

"Win a synopsis critique and advice from the Crabbit Old Bat herself! Surrounding publication on January 20th of Write a Great Synopsis – An Expert Guide, I will be visiting a number of blogs for a guest post, review or interview. If you’d like the chance of winning help with your synopsis, simply leave a relevant comment on any of the guest posts. (This could be a deep and meaningful comment or a plea to the gods of fortune to pick you!) One comment per post – but comment on each post if you wish. On February 15th, each blog host will send me the names of valid commenters and I will do a random selection, using a random number generator.
Prizes: 1st prize – a critique of your synopsis, at a mutually convenient time; plus a signed book of your choice, if available. 2nd prize – a critique of your synopsis. 3rd prize – a signed book of your choice, if available."

So, without further ado, I'll let the interview commence, and say a humungous thank you to Nicola for letting herself be subjected to questioning. I do hope my readers will go and visit the rest of the blogs on this fabulous tour. You'll find them appearing as they happen on the right hand side here. People who are new here, you probably want to avoid looking round carefully or you will be subjected to poetry, videos of poetry and highly iffy opinions about literature and publishing.

For details of how to buy this super book, click here or the cover below. Oh, and there's even a trailer vid at the end put together by Nicola's highly talented daughter. And finally, Nicola will be at Blackwell's tomorrow night!! Don't miss the chance to come along and give her chocolate!






Thank you very much Dan, for letting me come and talk about synopses, one of my favourite topics and not at all the nasty thing that most writers think!


1. So, the fantasy shoe...
I am brand averse. So, I’d never go shoe brand-hunting or choose/reject a shoe based on the name. My fantasy shoes are elegant, pointy toed, stiletto but not high, and a million times more comfortable than they look, because I’m no fool. They also stay firmly on my feet, because there’s nothing worse than them slipping off when I’m on the red carpet. (Well, you did say fantasy.)

2. Seriously, though. If Converse produced a Nicola Morgan special edition, what design would they have?
*checks internet to see what Converse shoes look like* Erm, I’d rather they didn’t. I remember you asking me once whether I was a Converse or something else (eh?) fan and I had to go and look them both up. Didn’t like either! Converse looks to me like an expensive way of dressing up a plimsoll.



3. I often joke that the main reason I decided to self-publish is so I don't have to write a synopsis, but I actually find them rather fun. Maybe it's because I went to a school where English lessons were frequently comprehension and precis. Why do you think the synopsis has such a mythology of dread around it, and what basic skills should writers be working on before they ever get to their own synopses to help them when they do?
I’m with you on the précis. I loved loved loved doing them. Why the dread? Because people mean several different things when they say “synopsis” and writers stress about which* one is being talked about and surmise that it’s all a flux-ridden mystery. It’s not. WAGS unpicks all that and more and removes all reason for fear. It even gives you a method and examples and answers to all the synopsis-related questions I’ve ever been asked. And it explains my patent Crappy Memory Tool. Skills? Verbal agility and a wide vocabulary but if you’re a good enough writer to write a good enough book, you’ve got those.

* And let me emphasise that in the book, as here, I make clear that the one I’m talking about is the one an agent or publisher wants before signing you.

4. My personal intuition is that most people who struggle with a synopsis do so because they don't know what their book is about...
I think they know too much about what their book is about and can’t see the clearing for the forest. They need to find the core and slash and burn the rest.

5. Honestly and, ahem, off the record, what percentage of agents read the synopsis before the manuscript and will go no further if it's awful?
I’m not doing percentages because I’d be making them up but from my enquiries and my intuition, the vast majority read the letter, then the sample chapters and only then the synopsis, and they only read that if the first two items were good enough. But if they did read it before the sample chapters and if it revealed that this was completely not the sort of book the agent would handle, they would probably not read on. But this would be because the book was wrong, not the synopsis. If the synopsis also revealed awful writing ability, they wouldn’t go on but I believe they’d have known that from the covering letter and would never get to the synopsis or the sample. The synopsis is the least important part of the submission, but it does have a function and it’s that function you need to consider..

6. Suppose the first three chapters are great. How likely is a poor synopsis to stop the agent asking for the rest of it, or have they already fired the e-mail off before they get there?
Unlikely. Only if (as above) the synopsis reveals that this is completely the wrong book for this agent. But they would most likely know that from the covering letter or sample. So, unlikely. And again, that’s unlikely to be the poor synopsis but the wrong book. Also, depends how “great” and how “poor”!

7.One of my pet peeves is the "How I sold a million by breaking all the rules" anecdote that every big name author seems to be able to drag out. Can you explain, without using the CAPS lock, why it is more important for writers to read a book like yours, digest it, then do what it says rather than trying to emulate this week's maverick du jour in being "original"?

Easy. I don’t need CAPS lock. I have three thoughts for you. First, it’s possible for someone to cross a motorway blindfolded and not be killed; that does not mean that crossing the motorway blindfolded is an advisable way to live a long life. Second, actually, you are perfectly welcome to ignore everything I say. Just read it first so that you know what you’re ignoring and why. Third, your idea of original could be off the agent’s nutter-scale.

8. If someone asked you how long it took to write a really good synopsis, would the chosen unit in which you responded be: 1. hours, 2. measures of whisky, 3. percentage increase in grey hair coverage, or 4. dairy milk bars?
Minutes. About twenty. Why would you need or want to spend more? You only need more if you’re messing around on Twitter.

9. Finally, and with huge thanks for being such a star, could you say, in summary points as it were, what the difference is between a synopsis and a plot outline?

I’d say read the book, tbh :) But, ok, in very brief: an outline a) is chronological b) is more comprehensive and therefore longer and c) includes such things as POV switches. A synopsis needn’t be chronological; it is shorter and more elegant. But it is still functional and let me leave you with that over-riding thought: a synopsis is not poetry but function. The function of the synopsis is to show its reader that you completed your story successfully and satisfyingly, in a way that suits the genre. It’s not a necessarily beautiful thing. But it can be.

Dan, thanks so much for hosting me! Happy synopsis-writing to all your readers.

Thank you, Nicola!
And here's the video!

From Pitch to Perpetuationof Privilege: why publishing MUST change its application procedures

The pitch is the publishing Industry’s equivalent of the University Entrance exam, a selection system that perpetuates disenfranchisement, and serves to narrow the pool of available applicants to a point where the literary world becomes nothing more than the chattering classes talking among themselves. As was the case for hundreds of years in our universities, no one has really noticed this until now, because the people the literary industry marginalise had been marginalised from other forms of communication. Worst of all, they have gone unnoticed because they have until now had no expectation or belief that literature is their world.

But as wider and wider portions of society become cultural consumers, so their hunger for stories by and about people like them grows. Television, through initiatives like the BBC’s My Story, is beginning to take notice, but the publishing industry is standing back and does not, it is my firm belief, even realise there is a problem.

This is just another example of an introspection that will in the not too distant future kill the industry off if it doesn’t do something. The fact is the internet is making culture by and for previously unrepresented voices (be they inner city teenagers, battered sex workers, refugees fleeing from, and would-be refugees trapped in, the world’s war zones, or the women of the world’s shanty towns) widely available. And it’s great. Millions of voices are being heard that would never have been heard before – hope that “I am not alone” is being offered to millions more who never heard culture spoken in their own voice before.

It’s a WONDERFUL thing.

And it’s a phenomenon that is going to kill publishing dead. Or rather, pass it by on the road whilst publishing kills itself. Unless the industry does something serious and soon.

There are many thins the publishing industry needs to look at if its isolation from the consumers of the majority world is not to prove fatal, and I’ve got time to talk about them all eventually. But today I want to focus on the flagship ridiculosity: the query.

This is NOT a piece about higher education. I am merely referring, in passing, to an allegation levelled at the entrance exam (because it IS true of publishing, and it’s a good analogy). The problem with the university entrance exam, the argument goes, like the problem with the 11+, is that you do better if you’re coached for it. Which means you do better if your parents have the money AND the inclination to pay for a tutor. Which means two children of equal “ability” will finish with very different marks. Which means, finally, that if selection is based on entrance exam performance alone children whose parents lack either the money or the inclination to pay for coaching will be disadvantaged when it comes to getting a university place. And to add to all this, the privilege this perpetuates means that those from marginalised backgrounds expect not to get places, so they don’t apply, furthering the divide.

That may or may not be true of universities, but I’m sure you get the logic. And if you don’t get where I’m going, then frankly, well, I can’t say in polite company.

At the moment (and especially in the US where you don’t submit ANY script with your query), whether you get an agent depends on the quality of your query, and a huge part of that is the synopsis and, even more, the query letter. There are many wonderful websites and books devoted to polishing your pitch, and I have benefited immensely from them (and still do). But the system reinforces the status quo in a way that is both shocking, and seemingly invisible to the industry.

How are those who do not currently read their voice in books, written by people like them, and who have stories to tell, and a talent for telling them, get published? They must submit a query – for which they have no training – not just because they have no access to the great query sites and books out there (they may well HAVE the internet), but because they are not surrounded by people who know about sites like this. They may not even know what the “application” method is. It is a mystery. So what happens? They don’t send off their stories – “people like them don’t write books”. And the divide is reinforced.

So what? Well one, it’s just wrong that people be denied a voice for their story – and the notion that the vast swathes of people underrepresented in publishing are underrepresented because there is no talent is just nonsense. Systemic barriers are wrong. Full stop.

Two, these are groups of society for whom the internet allows, more and more, instant access to the consumption and production of culture by and about “people like them”. Whole groups are realising that culture is for them. But books aren’t – and THAT is the problem for the publishing industry. A vast swathe of ever more powerful cultural consumer is ignoring books because books are irrelevant to them.

So what does publishing need to do? Well, more than anything else, what it needs to do is what the “Russell Group” of universities (the UK’s “old elite”) sort of tries to pay lip-service to doing. It needs to stop talking to itself. It needs to stop telling would be writers about “show not tell”. It needs to stop focusing on how to write a query letter. Stop focusing, mind, not stop doing – there is, and always will be, a very large, commercially and culturally important group who like books done that way. What publishers need to wake up to is the fact that this is a segment of the population – a segment whose share of wealth, purchasing power, and access to culture, is shrinking.

What the publishing industry needs to do is not try and “help” people on the “outside” to get to the “inside”. People don’t need it. They have other ways of telling their stories. IT needs THEM. And that is something I have NEVER heard someone on the “inside” admit. So what SHOULD the industry do? It needs to find ways to convince the new generation of storytellers that books are a good medium through which to tell those stories. It needs to think like an “outsider”.

Sadly, I really don’t think it can. Which is why more and more of us who would, ten years ago, have been part of the “trying to get inside” crowd, are ignoring it, letting it slowly eat itself to death, whilst we get on and enjoy the exciting future.

Half of me thinks it’s a tragedy. The more so because, like an animal walking to the abattoir, or a patient slipping gently from a coma, I really think most of the industry doesn’t recognise it. But half of me thinks that systems which perpetuate divide and exclusion SHOULD perish, and wonders if we shouldn’t offer a helping hand.