Synopsis - one page that makes you want to smack people

Synopsis. Even the word itself sounds like a disease. I'm sorry, Mr Jones, I don't know how to tell you this, but you have a synopsis. You shouldn't have been writing ten pages a day for the last twenty years... Are you sure, doctor? Oh my gods, what am I going to tell my wife and kids?! 

You see, I have written all these books, and a possible next step would be sending them to the publishers / literary agents. I desperately want you to read the story and they are one of the ways to go, channeling strings of letters into your bookstores.

But they all demand a synopsis.

I have never really written a proper one, so I approached the subject my way: doing a quick research and pretending I know everything about it after reading the content of two websites. From that, I gathered that it must be 500-700 words. Let me get this straight: you have to cram the entire book, that's 95000 words or 300 pages, your sweat and tears, into one pager of 500 words.

Now imagine you've just completed an epic painting. I mean, it's your masterpiece. You corrected that one line, like, fifty times, because it didn't quite meet your standards. Hell, you may have even torn down the first canvas and set it on fire, because it wasn't EXACTLY what you wanted.

But you did it. You're standing in front of it, amazed, taking it all in. Well done, you, you tell yourself, you talented little rascal. You are awesome.

Excited, you are calling one of the top galleries in the country, feverishly explaining you have this wunderbar thing, simply a million-dollar baby. And they tell you, doubt in their voice already: "OK, then... Could you just draw a quick outline and fax it to us, so we can tell you if we're interested in even seeing your work."

You finish the conversation and look at the phone for a while, seriously considering whether you should go to that place and cram it down the snooty artsy-fartsy bastard's throat...

Recognising it? No wonder the man cut off his own ear...

That's how writing a synopsis feels like. If I could tell my story in 500 words, I wouldn't have written ninety-five freakin' thousand!

Sad Batman confirms...

Having said that, I understand why synopsis is necessary. It's like sampling wine; you need to try it before you decide whether it's good enough. (Only this may not be the greatest example; wine is wine and you drink it regardless...) Or foreign food, perhaps. You shouldn't feast on Tunisian food, for example, because the consequences could be dire and when you're on that British Airways plane back home, all you can do is thank all available deities for leaving North Africa and diarrhoea behind you... (But that's another story...)

Even poor agents need something to save their time (I mean, it must be horrible, to read books for a living) and choose the best of the best. And hence I shall get that intestine-twisting, throat-cramming synopsis disease out of the way, writing the greatest 700 words I can. In font 10 and with narrow margins, so it fits on one page.