You want to pitch a book to someone in the industry who already has an idea of the kind of thing you do. They’ve read the first in your series, and they’ve asked, ‘Is there a sequel?’ The good news is you probably won’t have to write the whole thing out before you say, ‘Yes, here it is.’ Often all they’ll need is a few sample chapters and a synopsis.
The bad news (for me): I hate writing synopses. They scare me.
A synopsis is a dead thing. All your tricks lie naked to the eye. There’s no suspense. There’s no pulse from the page. It’s as if, instead of cooking someone a lovely meal, filling the kitchen with aromas and then sitting down to enjoy it with them, you handed your friend a recipe of what you were going to cook and just asked them to imagine it. It’s very hard to feel excited about that. If you don’t feel excited, it’s very easy to feel that no reader is ever going to be excited by your finished product. And that feeling is fatal.
Also this: your synopsis is a shadow of your book. For a shadow to exist, the real thing must also exist, somewhere. (Isn’t that what Plato said?) You may not actually have written your novel, but you must have put in the primary effort of planning it out, thoroughly. You have to have a good feel for who your characters are, why they do this, why they do that, what the consequences are, what the twists are, how you build to your climax. Now, there’s a price to be paid for this kind of planning. You may lose spontaneity. You are leaving less room for the inspiration that hits you as you write (See Plotting) But you can’t put forward a synopsis with visible gaps and expect it to persuade.
So no, you don’t have to write out a whole novel. But yes, you do have to work at this. It’s going to have taken me about a month of thinking and scribbling to produce the synposis-and-sample-chapters I’m doing at the moment, compared to the year (give or take) I would need to produce the finished article. I’m having to work it out scene by scene, if only to persuade myself that it does work. And this synopsis is now,er, twenty pages long…
Twenty pages? Think two. Two pages is the most anyone’s going to want to look at.
Looks like this synopsis is going to need its own synopsis.Aaargh!
Last Updated on February 23, 2026 by John