The key to a synopsis is to forget your book

I've always known that the best way to learn something really well is to teach it. You think you know something but until you put it into words for someone else to understand, you don't know if you know it properly. And you might find you don't.

My point? While writing my forthcoming book, Write a Great Synopsis - An Expert Guide, I have learnt something extra about how to write synopses. I learnt it from myself, I hasten to add, but it was the act of trying to explain everything about synopses as clearly and fully as possible that showed me a truth I hadn't been aware of.

So, am I going to make you wait till January when WAS comes out? Of course I'm not! I wouldn't be so cruel.
My lightbulb moment came when I was preparing to write a synopsis of Wasted, as an example to go in the book. I enjoyed writing it and it took about fifteen minutes, perhaps less. "Well, this is a doddle," I thought. "I always knew people stressed too much about synopses." I wondered why I found it easy. And then I realised.

I'd forgotten the order of events in Wasted. I'd forgotten everything except the most important events, characters and emotions, the core drivers of the book, the skeleton and the skin. I'd (accidentally) deleted from my memory everything that shouldn't be in a synopsis. And I didn't look at the book once while writing the synopsis because a) I didn't need to, which is the point and b) I'm lazy.

This made me think of two analogies which I'd already used in Write a Synopsis but which now became clearer.

The conscious human analogy 
If your synopsis were a human being, we'd see the skin and have a sense of the strong skeleton but we would not see the organs and veins, because the vital gleam in the eyes would be sufficient evidence that the body was properly constructed. Also, you need to include the ending, because otherwise you've got a body without feet.

The journey analogy
If your book is a journey, the synopsis needs to include:
1. Who is on the journey and why?
2. What is the intended destination and why?
3. What terrible thing will happen if they don't reach their destination and who or what is trying to stop them?
4. What happens to knock the travellers off course?
5. What characteristics and tools do they use to get back on course?
6. What is their actual destination and who survives and with what injuries?

Here’s what we do not need to know (unless what we're writing is an outline, which, as I explain in WAS, is different):  
1. All the detours they took along the way - unless without it we can't understand the book
2. The weather.
3. What they said to each other.
4. What the scenery was like.
5. The people they met along the way, unless without them we can't understand the book.
6. The route in order.

Because my dyslexic-behaving brain can't do sequences, I can never remember what order things happened in, or even that half of them did. This makes my brain perfect for writing synopses and the amazing thing is that until I tried teaching you lot about all this I didn't even know my brain was perfect for anything.

Hooripity-yay.

So my message to you today is: when writing your synopsis, cultivate a really crappy memory like mine, a memory that forgets everything except essence. To paraphrase all of our mothers: if you can't remember, it can't have been very important. And if it's not important, it has no place in your synopsis.

Therefore: whatever you do, don't look at your book when writing your synopsis. Your book has no place there.