When submitting your novel, most agents ask to see a pitch letter, a synopsis, and the first three chapters. Authors are fine with writing the book (of course), borderline with the pitch letter (though see my blog on the ‘perfect’ cover letter), and faintly horrified by the idea of the synopsis. How on earth do you reduce a 100k long word book to 2 pages! What if it’s boring?! What’s the point in giving the twists away?!

The first thing to say – and every agent is different – is that I will always read the cover letter and pages first. They’re the key part for me. I tend to only look at the synopsis if I’m potentially on the fence about something. So I might think that the writing is good but I can’t see where the plot is going, or that I am intrigued by the set-up but am not sure how the plot will unfold.

I think writing a synopsis can be helpful as a way to visualise how your story unfolds. If your synopsis ends up 10 pages long – maybe there is too much plot! Or perhaps at the end of the synopsis it becomes clear that not a huge deal happens in the book: and that might be a problem when you are trying to hook in an agent or a publisher.

Here are some rough guidelines for perfecting your synopsis:

• They’re told in present tense, in a third person (omniscient) voice. An example would be: Harry Potter fights the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets, and wins. I would recommend against narrating the synopsis from the perspective of the main character, or using past tense.

• They should give away the twists at the end. So it should be ‘he keeps her captive but ultimately she escapes, killing him’, rather than ‘he keeps her captive – but will she escape?’

• They should focus on the main narrative arc of the novel. You don’t need to reference every subplot in the text, just the main plot, with brief mentions of key subplots.

• Focus on the main protagonist, and mention other key characters, but don’t include a full cast list! If you have twenty key characters it could be very confusing to follow: so focus on the protagonist, and the antagonist, or just a few of the core players in the narrative. 

• It should be told in fairly neutral language: it isn’t a sales document. So you don’t need to say ‘with a flick of his sword he disarms her, leaving her to bleed out on the floor, her hopes and dreams crushed by his cruelty.’ You’d say ‘he wins the duel and leaves her body on the floor.’ It’s a technical document, not a marketing document.

• It should be 1-2 pages, 1.5/double-spaced, for ease of reading.

Good luck!