Successful Synopsis Writing Tips
Writers hate the job of writing a synopsis. For you, it might be right up there with death and public speaking in terms of the fear factor. If you’re having trouble and are procrastinating about writing your synopsis, you’re in very good company. Here are a few tips to make everything a bit easier:
Write A Mini Synopsis:
If all else fails, write a short paragraph that hooks the reader. Use this paragraph in your query letter. It is better to include this mini synopsis and get your manuscript mailed to an agent rather than suffering over it, wasting precious time trying to create the perfect synopsis.
Use Similar Formats:
Write a synopsis in the same format as your manuscript. If you’re not sure of the industry standard, find someone who might be able to aid you by providing industry-standard format requirements. Double-space your synopsis. Use one-inch margins all around. Use left justification only, and stay away right justified text. Make sure you place a header on every page, and use Times New Roman or Arial font instead of Courier.
Describe The Story:
Begin by describing your story in 25 words or less. You must capture the agent’s or editor’s attention. If you succeed in creating this “hook,” you’ll be farther ahead than most people submitting their work. Editors and agents read hundreds of submissions every day, so don’t get cutesy. Keep the reader awake, and don’t be boring!
Summarize:
Include a COMPLETE summary of your story from beginning to end, written in present tense. Focus on major plot points or turning points. Omit secondary characters, subplots, and minor events. Don’t go into too much detail.
Focus:
Focus your synopsis by telling what the book is about, not how things happen. Keep focused on your primary characters and major events. As is always the case–show, don’t tell.
Do not ask empty questions in your synopsis. They will not fool the agent into asking for the remaining pages of your manuscript. Include the setting, main characters, and the all-important CONFLICT. Identify conflict between characters. Include motivation. Then, show the resolution of this conflict.
The END:
Finally, TELL YOUR ENDING. Wrap up the story. Everyone knows (removed the word the) writers like to tease the reader and keep ‘em guessing, but stay clear of this trap.
Finalize and Test:
Once all is completed, proofread your synopsis. Make sure grammar, punctuation, and spelling are perfect. Test your synopsis on a qualified friend or relative. Would they be interested in reading the entire book based on your synopsis? If not, ask how you can make it more interesting. Ultimately, use your own “gut” to determine what works.
Limit your synopsis to one or two pages and make sure you include enough information to tell your story. Remember, the goal is to get the agent or editor into the first pages of your book. That’s where the real story begins!!
Author is a writer for Writers Relief who specialize in helping authors write a successful synopsis summary. For more information you can visit http://www.WritersRelief.com.
Writing Help And Morning Pages
Reading Julia Cameron’s “The Sound of Paper” is like revisiting an old friend. For more than fifteen years, her morning pages have been my daily writing help, the friend that coaxed me out of fear and inertia about putting words on paper and like the Nike slogan, urged me to “Just Do It!”
Why is it so difficult to write? Writing is an activity removed from direct experience. Writers have often mourned the loss of words to describe an event and this is probably because rendering what happened in words involves a completely different set of neural motor skills. Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontent” sees writing as technology; both he claims act as “prosthetics” to the body, functioning as an appendage or addition. Even the word “prosthetics” is ambivalent, carrying both the negative connotation of loss or compensation and the positive sense of extension. After all, writing is a later development of the human brain and signals not only the beginning of recorded history but also the evolution of the highly specialized and compartmentalized intelligence in the prefrontal cortex.
In “The Sound of Paper”, Julia Cameron reiterates what she has so poignantly elaborated in her previous books–the creative self is buried so deep in our psyche, we have to develop ways to let it out. And morning pages, like solitary walks or runs, done consistently on a daily basis, form the “pivotal tool of a successful creative life (2).” The difficulty we experience in writing comes from the specialized voice in our head: “We write grudgingly and under half steam, resentfully and uphill. ‘Who cares ‘and ‘This is stupid’ are our companion thoughts (25).” It is usual, when the inner voice is struggling to find a place in the outer world, that the censor places it under a scalpel. Without the writing help of morning pages, most voices remain unheard.
The easiest form of writing is the trade school type that disseminates information. The writing that engages our authentic being, our fears and passions is the most difficult to execute. It demands a different kind of writing help– rigorous and open self-acceptance, a visceral catharsis of our “self” on paper and unless we have built a conduit of safe passage for this inner voice, the water can be treacherous indeed. Many writers have been drowned by voiceless inundation.
The morning pages, like the daily walk or run, is a means to engage this voice. Writing first thing in the morning allows you to evade the censor. “Spilling out of bed onto the page” (as Julia Cameron puts it) helps the writing self side-track the critic. The repetitive nature of the morning pages assures your psyche safe passage on your journey. Securely ensconced in a routine, it will spill its guts out–and that’s what you want.
Without this spillage, the daytime writing that you do will never quite have that ring of authenticity that is the mark of a writer who has made the plunge into her instinctual being. Because these morning pages are not meant for public scrutiny, they are your means of internal housekeeping, letting the little woman (or man) have her say about things in the house. And the more she is allowed her say, the stronger your trust in your gut instinct and the more resilient you are to the opinion of others.
It’s like building a set of muscles with running. On most days, I do not feel like running. But what I have found is that the simple act of lacing my running shoes, getting out into the pavement or treadmill, beginning the motion of running will trigger a visceral engagement that changes the entire experience. More often than not, my best runs have been on days when I least wanted to run. Had I listened to my head, I would have missed a fabulous engagement with my legs. The head seems always at odds with the body and writing help that works with the body somehow straightens out the head.
Both morning pages and running take time, but as with everything else, an investment of time and effort is in order for the miraculous to take place. We expect miracles to fall from the skies, part of our belief that we should be getting something for nothing. This sense of entitlement is the one of the most debilitating myths of the self help industry. Ask and it will be given–yes–ut we must also do our share of moving in the right direction.
Writing help like morning pages takes no more than twenty minutes; you are spilling your guts onto the page, not deliberately crafting words. Running or walking can take up forty minutes or more. Is it too much to ask for an hour a day to invest in physical and psychical musculature?
A runner for 27 years, retired schoolteacher and writer, Mary is helping people reclaim their bodies through nutrition, exercise, positive vision and creative engagement. You can visit her at http://www.GreatBodyat50.com or learn how she lost her weight at http://www.greatbodyproteinpower.com
Building a Following for Your Writing
The Internet has changed the way publishing is done forever. Instead of taking months, or even years, to build a following for your writing, you can begin to build a following in just days.
Building a following for your writing is crucial to your publishing success. Without readers, you have no one to read your writing.
Although I know most writers hate marketing, if you take the time to market your writing, you will build your following more quickly and see results.
Your first step in building a following to your site should be to add a list. This can be a simple autoresponder script where you add a subscription box to your site. This way, readers can subscribe to your list to get updates, read your newsletter, as well as any announcements you may make about future writing.
Once you’ve create your list and add it to your site, you need to promote it. You can start by submitting your list to ezine directories.
These days, there are about 10 to 20 good directories where you can submit your list. Once you’ve submitted your list, then you need to find other directories to submit to.
Start by submitting to general directories. Many will ask you to exchange links, so you’ll need a links page on your site. Once you’ve linked to the general directories, you need to use the search engines to help you find links pages on your topic.
For example, if you write poetry, then go to Google and type in “links: poetry”. This will help you find sites on your topic that may offer links pages. You can then visit each site and exchange links, or better, get a backlink.
To be honest, this is very time consuming. However, if you do this every day, and link to five sites a day, at the end of one year, you’ll have over 1,500 links for your site.
There are other ways to build a following for your writing. Writing articles is an excellent way to do it although some writers don’t think you should ever write without getting paid for it.
I choose to write free articles to promote because one article can make you thousands because of its viral nature. If you get paid for an article, you can only publish it one time. This may make you $25 to a few hundred dollars.
When writing your articles, remember you have two audiences: other writers, and readers. You may choose to write about certain writing techniques for writers, whereas with readers, you may choose to tell them the history of a place.
For example: you’ve written a romance novel on Medieval Scotland. What better way to introduce readers to your work than to write an article on Medieval Scotland, i.e. what it was like to live there, the clothes, or something else?
Remember, you only have a few hundred words to communicate your message. Narrowly focus your topic for best results.
Finally, participate in forums. Make sure you join forums for both writers and readers. Many writers are readers, so they’ll definitely be interested in what you have to say. I’ve found some of my best reads this way.
Regardless of what type of writing you write, if you want to make a living doing it, somethin most writers only dream about, then consider your audience. Build a relationship with them, and they’ll buy everything you sell.
Jinger Jarrett wants to give you free publicity for your writing. Submit your marketing and writing articles, press releases, links, and ads at
http://www.marketingforwriters.com. Get $3,780 in free writer’s stuff. Visit her bookstore at http://www.lulu.com/jingerjarrett.
Spelling Matters - Confessions of the World’s Worst Speller
This is a true story about my friend, Doug O’Brien. He is an accomplished musician and NLP trainer, personally trained and certified by Tony Robins and yet he had the following confession to share with me:
Confession number one: I was the world’s worst speller.
Confession number two: I always hated my brother and sister.
Well, OK, not really. But I hated that they always got such good grades in school when it was such a struggle for me. I was really good at sports and really good at art and music. I was good at science too, but I couldn’t spell my way out of a paper bag. Actually, when it came right down to it, I was only really bad at spelling and, fortunately, it only affected my grades in subjects that used words.
Now this was especially frustrating cause I started out thinking I was pretty clever. I was reading better than most kids in my grade early on. It was easy. You sounded out the letters and put them together to make words. E. Z.
But then something weird started happening. For some reason, the same sounding-it-out process that worked so perfectly for reading didn’t work for spelling. When the teacher said a word on the spelling test, I’d repeat how it sounded in my head and figure out what letters made those sounds and write them down. I was wrong more than half the time and got no points for creativity.
I didn’t get it. It was a complete mystery to me. My confidence plummeted. I felt stupid and silly. Moreover, I couldn’t get any help. My Dad told me to look up the spellings in the dictionary. But he couldn’t explain to me how to go about doing that when I didn’t know how to spell the word I was looking up.
“Work harder,” I was told. I spent hours memorizing the order of the letters by repeating them out loud over and over again. I think I remember only once ever getting a 100% on a spelling test.
So part of me began to believe I was stupid. My good grades in science and several other subjects weren’t enough to convince me otherwise. Of course, it was logical to make that deduction. No matter how hard I tried it didn’t get any better so I must be stupid, right?
No. The answer to that question is emphatically no. But, I didn’t find that out for many years after graduating high school. Part of me still believed it even as a grownup, while running a successful seminar promotion company in New York. I joked about being “the world’s worst speller.” (Unfortunately, my secretary wasn’t much better so we were awfully glad when word processors began to have spell check.)
Then it happened. I attended a seminar by a co-developer of NLP, Robert Dilts. This is the study of the structure of subjective experience. It holds out the promise that since any skill or ability is a result of that structure, that ability can be “modeled” and taught to another human being.
Astonishingly, to illustrate this, Robert used spelling as an example. It wasn’t that poor spellers were stupid, Robert said, it was that they had been taught an ineffective strategy for spelling. This struck me as a radical idea.
He explained how human beings process our experience of the world with our five senses and that each sense had different advantages and disadvantages. He said, as an example, phonics (sounding out the words) works well for reading but that it doesn’t work for spelling. He points out that you can’t even spell the word “phonetics” phonetically! Instead, when you analyze the strategy that good spellers use, they visualize the word in their mind’s eye and get a good feeling when it is spelled right.
He then demonstrated how this worked. He got a volunteer from the audience (He did not pick me even though my hand was high in the air) who was a self-proclaimed bad speller and asked them to spell the city, “Albuquerque.” We all watched as the volunteer looked down at his feet, squirmed uncontrollably, and tried to talk his way through the mysterious word.
As you can imagine, that method didn’t work. He wasn’t even close. (Neither, by the way, was I, spelling at my seat.) So then Robert had him write the word out on a big piece of paper in small chunks of two or three letters, “Al - bu - quer - que.” He had the volunteer write each word chunk in a different color and then practice visualizing those chunks with his eyes closed. Finally, he put them all together and spelled Albuquerque correctly for the first time in his life. Then, as if that wasn’t impressive enough, he spelled it backwards!
I was sold! I wanted some of this! Over the next few days I practically filled a notebook with large, colorful, small-chunked spelling words and showed off how I could spell backwards and forwards.
Today I am content to spell forwards most of the time and I have to confess am happy to have relinquished the title of world’s worst speller. My hope is that someday no one will have to wait until adulthood to learn to spell like a champ.
Peter Woronoff is a Master Practitioner in NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming with Doug O’Brien, personally designated by Tony Robbins as an NLP Master Trainer,and Rob Marton,he has designed spellinglab site to teach 3rd graders a fun and easy way to spell. http://www.spellinglab.com
Article Plagiarism: the Next Internet Ripoff?
Content is King! shout the search engines. That’s what the search engines love. We also love the non-reciprocal links that we get for our websites when our articles are published on other peoples’ sites with our resource boxes dutifully appended below them.
To create a well written article takes time and effort. We have to get everything right: it has to be of relevance to the reader in that subject field; it has to be well researched; all spelling, punctuation and grammar must be correct; it has to be a genuine contribution to that particular area of specialization, and so interesting that the editor will jump at the chance of publishing it. And, oh yes, all the right keywords have to be there, of the right density and in the correct proportions.
The well-crafted article must satisfy both the reader and the bot; both the aesthetics of the eye and the strictures of the code. So those of us who try and be at least a little bit serious about things know that a second draft is always necessary, and then a third. Then it’s best to sleep on it. Even after that, we know that we have to forget about it for a few days until we are able to come back to it again with a freshly critical mind. You prune it and nurture it. You take off the sharp edges and you tighten it up. If necessary you know when you have to tear it up and start over again.
Only after we have got it absolutely right - and then after spending many hours submitting to directories, editors of ezines, article announcement sites and individual webmasters - are we rewarded, perhaps, with those hard-won non-reciprocal inbound live hyperlinks.
But wait. There seems to be a problem. It appears that an increasing number of people are quite happy to simply copy and paste our work onto their own sites without a link back. Or they don’t bother to check if the link is ‘live’.
That would be bad enough. But there are other people who print our articles and then don’t even bother to name the person who wrote it.
But there’s far worse: those people who print our article and then announce to the world that they wrote it themselves! Some of those even have the temerity to add the copyright sign next to their name!
I may be being a bit too harsh. Perhaps these people don’t realize that they’re doing anything wrong. After all, the Internet was originally conceived as ownerless and based upon free and open source information. And I can think of nothing more Public Domain, in fact or in spirit, than the World Wide Web.
Yet just consider what it is these people are doing. They are stealing other peoples’ work and passing it off as their own. They are effectively also stealing the web traffic that goes with it, the traffic that our labors should be rewarding our websites with, and diverting it to their own. This is blatant plagiarism. It just should not happen. Theft is theft, in whatever medium.
I wrote an article a few months ago on Internet marketing for small businesses. A search for the title of that article on Google now returns 10,800 pages, so at least the title itself has been reproduced that number of times and in that number of different places. A search for a chunk of text from the middle of the article returns 536 pages, which suggests that the article text has been published in its entirety no fewer than 536 times. Great! So now I have 536 inbound links from that one article! Wrong.
I looked at individual entries of the article and in a surprising number of cases there were no backlinks at all. Also surprising - and somewhat sickening - was the number of individuals who wantonly attached their own names to my work.
I recently posted the same article to a fresh source of publishers. I was astonished at the response of one editor of a well-known directory who had rejected the article on the grounds that it was not mine! She had seen the same piece on many other websites under different names, she said, and it was not her policy to publish work that had been produced using “cookie cutter” techniques. I wrote back saying that it really was my own work, citing the URL of SitePro News where it originally aired as that day’s headline feature. She apologized and was even good enough to supply me with a list of names of people and sites who had published it as their own. I’m so tempted to publish their names here (perhaps I will on my blog; so watch out!) but have decided that discretion should rule. For the moment, at least.
But I think there is a clear message here. The fashion for article writing and publishing for content and backlinks is going through the roof at the moment. It’s like a mini Internet boom all of its own. And like any other boom it has attracted its own inevitable pack of rat-racers, chancers, charlatans and cheats; shysters who go for the shortcuts every time, while remaining quite happy for other people to do their work for them.
For the record, the convention is this: distribute and publish the article freely by all means. But it must be published in its entirety and unedited, and MUST include the resource box with a live hyperlink back to the author’s site (or wherever the author wants, for that matter).
Hey, now even my lawyer understands!
Next time I will publish their names gleefully, and be damned.
Gordon Goodfellow is an Internet marketing practitioner who lives and works in London, UK. His workload has been greatly reduced with the help of the useful article publishing tool found at http://www.applied-web-marketing.com/aa.htm
Welcome To Fantofa Articles Directory
Welcome To Fantofa Articles Directory