One of the things I do with my day is look over synopses for other people. Spec-fic ones, crime ones, chick-lit ones, non-fic ones, literary ones – you name it, I can flense it.
Something I’ve become especially aware of in the past couple of months is that literary novels in particular tend to have synopses that appear to have been beaten with the grim stick. In conversations with a few publishers, it’s also become apparent to me that it’s going to be a hard sell to get a publisher to pick up a novel on the grounds of a synopsis that reads like a litany of disaster – when you’re pitching fire, famine, flood, plague and general disaster, you need to think carefully about the touch you apply.
In The Truth About Cats and Dogs, one of the characters says “Try to make the tragedy a little less upbeat” … but in a synopsis, I’m starting to think maybe we need to make the tragedy a little more upbeat. Or rather, stop focusing so much on the bad, bleak stuff that happens and put an emphasis on the good and uplifting stuff that comes out of it. Show us how your characters overcome their human conditions; how they grow and beat the odds. Sure, you want a reader to understand that your character is facing down adversity, but it seems to me that the balance in these synopses is off – that writers are saying “These terrible things happen”, but forget to say “But this is how the MC handles it and, dude, here triumphs the human spirit!” Or something like that. Possibly with the word “dude’ appearing far less.
When you pen your synopsis and it focuses on the grim, a publisher may well walk away not feeling uplifted, but liable to slash their wrists or develop a drinking habit. A book that depresses readers is probably not going to sell … or if it does, it may well lead to a lemming-like parade over a cliff.
The point is not so much the recounting of the tragedy, but in showing how it was overcome.
Try to balance the light and dark in your synopsis – because that’s generally the first thing a publisher sees. It should make them want to read more, not upend the whisky bottle.
So, step away from the grim stick.
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