How To Try To Write A Synopsis

So now that my book is done, what to do next? I talked to my friend Christine, whose dad is an author, and she kindly put me in touch with him. The next thing I knew, I received an email from his friend asking me to send along an author's bio and synopsis. Great! Wait, what?

After a moment of panic, I looked up "author's bio" and found I only needed to write up a couple of sentences about myself. You know, listing all of the awards I've won for writing and all that. Since there are none, it was pretty easy to keep it short.

Then I looked up "synopsis". Okay, a two-page summary of my book. That's got to be easy, right? I did a little bit of research online and found out from different sources that a synopsis should be double spaced...or that it has to be single spaced. It should be four pages, but it can't be more than two pages. It should "show not tell", like all good writing does, but it should "tell, not show" since you only have two pages. Aaak! All the sites disagreed on just about everything, with the exception of three things: 1) Writing "the dreaded synopsis" sucks and 2) The first paragraph is critical in grabbing the reader's attention and 3) It's your ONLY chance to impress an agent and to get ANYONE to read your work! Basically, you could write Moby Dick, but if you don't have a great attention-grabbing synopsis, your big whale book is going straight into an agent's recycling bin.

And so, for three days now, I have been trying to write a synopsis. I've written it and rewritten it and now need to completely rewrite it again. I'm beginning to wonder, at what point is a synopsis harder to write than a novel? At any rate, I should get off of my blog and get back to the synopsis. Really, I'm just here to prove to myself that I don't have writer's block. Now, off to write that attention grabbing line!