Sunday, March 27, 2011

A Little More Stressful Than I Thought

One would think that writing a story would be the hard part of the writing equation, but its not.  For me, writing the story was the easy part, it was the query letter and synopsis that frustrated the hell out of me. 

When you submit a story to a publisher, they require a query letter and a synopsis.  A query letter is the cover letter for your submission.  Your person info, story descriptions, and plus a simple break down of your story.  The query letter isn't as bad as the synopsis but still stressful.  A query letter is only suppose to be one page long, so in this case short and sweet is what they are looking for.

The synopsis, oh how I hate you.  A synopsis is a break down of all your hard work into roughly three to four pages.  Sometimes even less if required by publisher.  Imagine you just wrote a twenty-five thousand word story and now you have to break it all down to the bare bones.  It can be a little frustrating.  I read that when you write a synopsis act as if your explaining it to a six year old.  The trick is to write a short and to the point synopsis and still make it entertaining to an editor.  Editors are busy people and don't have a lot of time to spend on long drawn out synopsises.

Me being me, I thought about it to much.  I couldn't decide what to leave out of the synopsis.  Its your work and you want them to see it all.  So with my first submission I wrote that darn synopsis over and over a lot.  Finally I was happy with it.  Stressful!!

I'm still learning as I go and still have a lot to learn, but I'm committed to my writing.  Therefore I don't have it in me to give up.

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