Photo by Suzy Hazelwood at Pexels.
The writing industries conference in March is offering a fantastic opportunity for writers to get a 1-1 with an agent. This is a unique opportunity and one which more than compensates for the £42 registration fee. To enter applicants must submit a synopsis which for many is far more difficult than actually writing the damn novel itself. Condensing those years of sweat and tears into one page of text requires precision and much contemplation regarding structure and style. I guess the skill is outlining the basic plot, the development of key characters and what you hope to achieve. But this is easier said than done. There is the danger of being too methodical, too formulaic so that your work comes across as impersonal and by association, unemotional. On the other hand over stating meaning could lead to a review rather than précis and patronise the educated reader. I’d like to offer some advice but I don’t have any because I have struggled with my own for years. It is with this in mind that WIC have potentially missed out on another important aspect to their conference. How about a discussion on composing the awful things?
The synopsis is a craft in itself and a ‘how to’ guide would be incredibly useful. Those who are not selected are going to be very disappointed. Offering written feedback as to where and how they went wrong would act as useful compensation and at the very least, would help when composing future endeavours.
All this aside, the 1-1 put me in a particularly unexpected moral dilemma when a good friend of mine said that he didn’t think he would have time to get his application in. At first I was secretly glad because the less who entered mathematically improved my own chances of selection. Writing envy, who on earth would think such a condition existed. I made sure I text the friend in question and encouraged him to enter. He’s a fantastic writer and I am 100% convinced he’s sitting on a best seller. I hope he found time because he’s got other work on at the moment which pays the bills but writing is, as Knut Hampson kind of wrote, something to starve for. It’s an insanely joyous personal journey that’s cheaper than therapy and brings a sense of control to the mind. Perhaps that’s why writing a synopsis is so difficult. It’s not ‘writing’, it’s not ‘imagination’, instead it’s hard factual reality – the very thing which we write to escape from in the beginning!
The synopsis is a nightmare and has nearly stopped me sending off work. I think it might be easier with genre fiction though, where there’s a more definite conclusion.