The Synopsis Is Your Compass
Writing the first draft of a novel is often about trying out audacious ideas, following tangents, experimenting, and digressing—without editing or judging. Fueled by curiosity and inspiration, these blowzy freewheeling first drafts are brimming with possibilities but after you’ve produced hundreds of pages, built a world, created a constellation of characters, you may feel overwhelmed. How do you make your way through this lush jungle of prose? How do you find the essential story?
Try writing a synopsis of your draft, in no more than 500 words. While this word count may feel limiting, squeezing those hundreds of pages into one or two forces you to distill your narrative and discover the heart of your novel. This synopsis is your compass, and it’s for your eyes only, the storyteller. It’s not slick sales copy. It’s not a query letter written to persuade a literary agent your novel is brilliant, or a punchy logline designed to entice readers. This synopsis is written to reveal the scope of your novel and provide you direction in a second draft. It is for you, the creator of this novel.
Prepare
Before you write your synopsis, identify four elements in your draft: characters, conflict, setting, and narrative arc.
Characters: Identify the protagonist(s) and secondary characters. How do you decide which characters to include in your synopsis? Mention only those characters who influence the protagonist or alter the direction of the story. Then ask yourself: What does the protagonist yearn for? Does she long to run the family business? Climb Mt. Everest? Colonize Mars? Save her son from addiction?
Conflict: Now that you know what the protagonist yearns for, what internal and external obstacles stand in her way? It’s crucial to be clear about this main conflict—and the protagonist’s motivations—before you write your synopsis. And because you’re seeking the heart of your novel and not just listing a string of incidents that happen to characters, include the emotional reactions that accompany the protagonist’s and other characters’ actions: fear of abandonment, hope for reconciliation, frustration, heartbreak, elation.
Setting: The time and place in which your story occurs is vital, as characters are products of place and culture. Locale, geography, weather, historical period, all create a sense of place. Is your setting—a colony on Mars, a yacht, present day Manhattan, a medieval castle, the Great Depression—vivid and crucial to the story?
Narrative arc: The narrative arc arises from the protagonist’s yearnings, motivations, obstacles, and how the characters react to these conflicts. Once you know what the protagonist longs for, the obstacles in her way, and her emotional twists and turns, you’ll find you have a bare-boned scaffolding, perhaps even a tentative map of events and incidents. You may not know the final plot, but you may have a sense of the inciting event, the climax, and resolution.
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Practice
Condensing your draft into a 500-word synopsis is no easy feat. You may find it helpful to practice by drafting a synopsis of a novel you’ve recently read. Write the synopsis from memory to see if you can identify the protagonist’s conflicts, his yearnings, the role of the setting, and how the story was resolved. Then compare your synopsis with the book jacket copy. While this sort of sales copy for a novel is designed to build excitement by withholding revelations and hinting at plot twists, book jacket copy often artfully compresses key information about the protagonist, obstacles, and narrative arc. For example, consider this brief description from my novel Her Best Self (Regal House, 2024):
Janelle Wolf longs to be the woman she once was—an adored wife, a loving mother, a career woman, a force in her community—before a car accident steals her memories, ruins her reputation, and upends her life. Her only solace is found in Lana, her psychic healer, but Lana’s motives are questionable at best. As Janelle’s memories are coaxed to the surface, the ugly truth behind her accident is revealed, and what she learns will unravel her marriage, disrupt her family, and turn her small Southern town upside down.
In just three sentences, this truncated summary reveals the novel’s characters, conflict, setting, and a hint of the novel’s narrative arc.
Characters: Janelle, the protagonist, who yearns to be the successful, admired woman she once was before an accident changed her life, and a main character, Lana, a shady psychic healer.
Conflict: Janelle blindly trusts her friend Lana, a manipulative grifter on the take, who claims she can help Janelle recover her memories, restore her reputation, and reclaim her sense of self.
Setting: A small Southern town where Janelle, once a pillar in the community, grew up and raised her family.
Narrative arc: Lana urges Janelle to discover memories that reveal an “ugly truth” that will disrupt her life, her family, and her community.
Here’s another example from Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory (Simon & Schuster, 2023), a gripping, page-turner of a novel set in the Deep South. The first paragraph of the jacket copy does a masterful job of capturing what’s at stake:
Gracetown, Florida, June 1950.
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.
The next paragraph tells us that Robbie “has a talent for seeing ghosts,” an eerie ability that may imperil or save him. Meanwhile, Robbie’s sister, Gloria, is frantically contacting relatives and connections in Florida “to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.”
Notice how this brief passage relates a wealth of information about the novel.
Characters: Robbie, the protagonist, a 12-year-old victim of injustice, who sees ghosts, and a main character, his older, devoted sister Gloria.
Conflict, obstacles, and emotions: Robbie is trying to survive the horror of a cruel and dangerous reformatory school and yearns to escape. As a Black adolescent in the Jim Crow South, he is terrified and powerless when he is unjustly accused of a crime. His sister is desperate to save her beloved little brother but finds the judicial system cruel and intractable.
Setting: June, 1950, Florida, Jim Crow South. An atmospheric, haunted reformatory school.
Narrative arc: The ticking clock here is rescuing Robbie before “it’s too late.” Robbie is petrified and a target of violence, but determined to survive, as he hones his talent for seeing ghosts. His sister longs to save him before he is assaulted or killed.
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Begin
Write your synopsis in third person, present tense (even if your novel is written in first person). You’re seeking clarity, so keep your sentences straightforward and precise, and boil down descriptions of events. Here’s an example of how you might tighten your synopsis:
Flabby: On vacation in Las Vegas, Darla searches the bar and hotel lobby for Brad and finally finds him in the casino where she tells him she resents that he has once again broken his promise to never gamble again and swears she will book a flight and leave.
Tight: On vacation, Darla confronts Brad about his gambling problem. Heartbroken, she swears she will leave him.
Don’t mention every event or include every scene. Your synopsis is not just a plot summary; you’re conveying events that specifically affect the protagonist’s decisions. When you use your synopsis to revise the manuscript, this will force you to pare away your narrative. You may have to jettison characters, kill subplots, and that’s a good thing. Do mention the characters’ emotional reactions to events. And include spoilers, plot twists, and resolved secrets.
Commit to writing a synopsis every day for a week. The process of wringing out your draft informs the subconscious and sharpens your creative instincts. Read over your synopsis to pinpoint realistic motivations, link events, and discover connections. This will drive tension and pacing in your novel.
With this winnowed version as your guide, you are ready for the next leg of your journey: writing the second draft. Referring to your synopsis will keep you on track and may provide an organic unity to your draft. Now you can add scenes that reinforce your character’s motivations and conflicts, and prune subplots that don’t. You’re clear on the role of the setting, and you have a narrative arc.
After a dozen chapters or so, try writing another synopsis to see if you’ve strayed off course, or to explore changes you want to make. Your synopsis is not binding, but malleable, and you may alter it as characters develop, as they are revealed through their actions. The synopsis is a tool to provide you with a bird’s eye view of your novel, a compass that reveals the lay of the land, to guide you through the topography of your novel.