The Synopsis Treasury (2 page)
Read The Synopsis Treasury Online
Authors: Christopher Sirmons Haviland
Tags: #Reference, #Writing; Research & Publishing Guides, #Publishing & Books, #Authorship
Read the summaries herein.
Buy and read the novels that were finally published, and compare. What changed? Did the changes improve the idea?
As a bonus, compare these synopses to the cover copy if available—the summary of the story usually found on the back of the novel or in the cover sleeve. Cover copy is designed to entice a reader, whereas the selections in
The Synopsis Treasury
are designed to entice a publisher.
I hope you are as fascinated reading all this as I have been!
—Christopher Sirmons Haviland
Editor,
The Synopsis Treasury
September, 2014
*
Barbara Bova passed away in 2009
***
Introduction
In thirty years as a professional editor for various New York publishing houses, I must have endured hundreds of synopses from all kinds of writers. The bad ones went on for pages, detailing every movement the characters made up to and including their bathroom breaks. The better ones surprised me, kindled my interest, and sometimes made me laugh—always a good thing during a long afternoon at the office!
But the best ones were those that opened a window on the writer’s mind. Most manuscript submissions come from strangers. We may know their agent and trust that person not to send us a potential space case, but the writers behind the submissions are unknown quantities. A well-crafted synopsis can introduce a new friend. What experiences do they bring to their writing? What personality quirks show through? What values will they stand up for in the story?
Most editors I know read the author’s writing sample before turning to the synopsis. If the writing isn’t strong enough, the synopsis may never get read at all. But if the sample pages are good, the editor will turn to the synopsis next—and you mustn’t waste a word.
The synopsis should not be a recitation of the events in your story. Even the most exciting action scene makes for tedious reading without the buildup of tension that occurs on the actual page. Complex relationships between characters can lose all nuance when reduced to straight description.
A synopsis can (and should be) a mini-sample of your ability to tell a story.
The Synopsis Treasury
is, as its title promises, a treasure-trove of how-tos.
Check out the wonderful grabber with which Orson Scott Card began an early outline of
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
:
“It’s 1492, and Christopher Columbus discovers America right on schedule—but waiting for him on the shores of Cuba are three Chinese.” I defy any reader not to go on.
Follow up with just a paragraph or so of straight plot description—
yes, it can be done!
—then move to deeper issues. As Joe Haldeman says in his synopsis of
Old Twentieth
, “Of course a novel is more than a plot line.” He went on to describe the subtext he planned to develop in the novel (in that particular case, the nature of self-awareness).
Or imitate the way Frank Herbert posed a major concept:
“
We can make a stab at understanding extreme unconsciousness and may even equate it with death, but we grasp extreme consciousness much more dimly. What we usually do is fall back on mysticism.” His synopsis went on to explain how he would explore that idea in the course of the story.
And you can never go wrong by providing some description of the potential audience. These days, acquiring editors must run a gauntlet of probing questions before getting approval to buy a manuscript. “Who’s the audience?” is always a biggie. “High-tech science fiction fans with an interest in the future of democracy” is the type of response an editor needs to be able to give. If you can make an editor’s job easier by spelling that out in your synopsis, it’s a stroke in your favor. Ben Bova does it beautifully in the outline of his novel
Mars.
All these suggestions and many more fill the pages of
The Synopsis Treasury.
C. S. Haviland has provided not only many ways to present your story at its best, but done the field a service by including a number of exchanges between major editors and writers. You will find this a work of great usefulness, but you will also admire the dialogue of intelligent minds. Enjoy!
—Betsy Mitchell
Betsy Mitchell has been a New York science fiction/fantasy editor for more than 30 years, holding senior positions at Baen, Bantam Spectra, Warner Books, and the Random House Publishing Group, where she spent ten years as Vice President/Editor-in-Chief of Del Rey. She currently divides her time between acquiring classic backlist in digital form for e-book publisher Open Road Media and editing for private clients.
She has edited more than 150 titles, including such works as
Gentlemen of the Road
by Michael Chabon,
Bearers of the Black Staff
by Terry Brooks,
Virtual Light
by William Gibson, and
Empire of Ivory
by Naomi Novik (all
New York Times
best sellers); the Hugo Award-winner
Hyperion
by Dan Simmons, and the Nebula Award-winner
Parable of the Talents
by Octavia Butler. She received a World Fantasy Award for co-editing the anthology
Full Spectrum 4
.
In May 2004 she oversaw the launch of Del Rey Manga and went on to edit a number of graphic novels, including the #1
New York Times
best sellers
The Exile
by Diana Gabaldon,
Odd is on Our Side
by Dean Koontz and Fred van Lente, and
Blood Work
by Kim Harrison.
***
H. G. Wells
Herbert George “H. G.” Wells was born in Bromley, Kent in 1866, and pursued a career in biology and teaching in his early life, at one time studying under Darwinian anatomist T. H. Huxley. But a lack of sustained enthusiasm for biology, and an increasing interest in social reform and political matters, eventually led Wells to writing. Complications with his health further led to him leaving his teaching career, and he began venting his political opinions by writing more fiction.
A short story called “The Chronic Argonauts” emerged from this, Wells’ first attempt at writing about a machine that allowed an inventor to travel through time. Inspired by this story, he would revisit the subject and expand upon it, injecting his feelings about human society and industrial relations. Encouraged by his publisher, he would serialize this time traveling story that would culminate in 1895 with his first fiction in long form:
The Time Machine
. In that same year,
The Wonderful Visit
was published, his satire about an angel that was shot because it was mistaken for a bird. However,
The Time Machine
’s provocative title and subject, released at the dawn of radio and electrical technology and other society-altering inventions making news, was rapidly intriguing to the public, overshadowing his favorably reviewed fantasy.
Bolstered by his new fame, and stumbling into a style of fiction not well defined at the time (which we would now call modern science fiction and fantasy) that was a natural vehicle for social commentary and extreme metaphor, in a mere six years Wells serialized and ultimately produced a string of novels that would become literary masterpieces:
The Island of Doctor Moreau
,
The Invisible Man
,
The War of the Worlds
,
When the Sleeper Wakes
, and
The First Men in the Moon
, while simultaneously writing dozens of short stories and non-fiction works, including
Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, Mankind in the Making
, “The Argonauts of the Air” (about the invention of a flying machine, prior to the first flight of the Wright Brothers), “The Land Ironclads” (which introduced giant war machines before the tank was invented) and “A Story of the Days to Come.”
Now considered one of the fathers of science fiction, Wells passed away in 1946.
While H. G. Wells is most remembered for his science fiction, a majority of his work cannot be classified as such. He wrote many short stories and novels that are considered mainstream drama, romance, and comedy. What follows is a letter by H. G. Wells* to an unknown American Publisher in early 1896, regarding his new novel,
The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll
. It was his fourth major novel, after
The Time Machine
,
The Wonderful Visit
, and
The Island of Doctor Moreau.
The Wheels of Chance
is a romantic comedy that takes place on a bicycling journey across the English countryside. Wells himself was an avid cyclist, and bicycles were at their height of popularity at this time, soon to be overshadowed by automobile mass-production. While the letter is not dated, it establishes that the story had not yet been published in novel form, but was about to be published in serial format in a weekly magazine-journal called
To-Day
which circulated from 1893 to 1905 from London, founded by Jerome K. Jerome (the famed author of
Three Men in a Boat
). Until the late twentieth century, it was common practice for novels to be published in serial format, and success of the story or author would later warrant republishing in book form. But as periodicals began to drift away from fiction and focus more on news, novels published as books became more successful.
In this letter, Wells presumed to tell the American publisher what he’d like to receive as payment, and that he’d only send along the complete story if the publisher was fairly certain of picking it up. This is not the recommended style of communication if you are an unpublished writer looking for a publisher for the first time. In today’s world, the publisher will ask you for the materials they need to make a decision: an outline perhaps, the first three chapters, and eventually the full manuscript. Then they may ask you for rewrites. And if you make it through all of that, they will tell you how much they are willing to pay (if they haven’t already). Unless you are already a successful writer, do not expect much room for negotiation, if any at all. Wells was already a celebrity author by the time of this letter, and even still was not yet at the peak of his success, with
The Invisible Man
and
The War of the Worlds
to follow in the two successive years immediately after
The Wheels of Chance
.
—CSH
Dear Sir
I have just completed a story of 60,000 words which will appear here serially in Mr. Jerome’s
To-Day
. It is a purely humorous work & describes the sensations & adventures of a drapers assistant during a ten days holiday tour upon a bicycle. At the outset he rides rather badly & experiences the usual fatigues of the beginner. He becomes involved with an elopement & finds himself (through no fault of his own) with a young lady (in rational areas) & a bicycle upon his hands. He is pressured by the lady’s friends. The young lady is a highly educated girl of advanced views which she has derived mainly from books, & the humour & a touch of pathos at last arises out of the contrast between her & the simpleminded, half educated, commonplace, sentimental & well meaning shopman. The details of bicycle riding, carefully done from experience, & the passing of characteristic scenery of the south of England, should, I think, appeal to a certain section of the public.
Of my published works the story is most like “The Wonderful Visit.” It has no ‘scientific’ element & it is entirely free from ‘horrors.’ It is longer & more carefully constructed, disposed to offer for the American rights of such a book. I am prepared to accept the following terms, of a one & a half dollar book—10% up to 1000 & then 15% with a cheque on account of royalties of £20. The story will begin to appear in
To-Day
in April & will run out in August. I have made no arrangements for American serial rights, & unless I do, the book will have to be published in America in April or May. As my time is so limited I shall be glad if you will send for the book only if there is a fair prospect of your publishing it. I could post the typewritten copy at once on receipt of a cablegram.
I am dear Sir,
Yours Faithfully,
H. G. Wells
*
*
From the H. G. Wells Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
***
Jack Williamson
Jack Williamson was born in 1908 and arrived in New Mexico via covered wagon at the age of seven, where his family homesteaded land that they still manage today. He first became aware of the new field of “scientifiction” in his late teens and decided that writing these new adventures would be even better than reading them. He sold his first story to
Amazing Stories
in 1928, and quickly became a popular writer in the genre, a distinction he held throughout his career. Named a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master in 1976, he won numerous awards for his writing, including both Hugos and Nebulas. He passed away in 2006.
Pathway to Print
Placing a story is somewhat like joining a conversation. You must know the language and the culture of the group, the ideals and taboos. You need a grasp of the topic under discussion and something fresh to add. You wait for a pause when your addition will be apt.
The contents of a magazine may be regarded as a conversation, the editor as the autocrat at the breakfast table. Any genre is a wider group of related conversations, with editors and publishers directing scores of separate tables, all sharing common interests.
A story idea can commonly be expressed in one sentence. In my own novel,
Darker Than You Think
, a hard bitten newsman finds himself a werewolf, hunting down and killing his former friends. In
The Black Sun
, a shipload of space colonists are marooned in the eternal frigid night on the dead planet of a dead sun. In
Terraforming Earth
, the fall of a giant asteroid sterilizes the globe and the tiny staff of a station on the moon must nurse life back to it.
I commonly write two or three opening chapters to test the idea. A story reveals itself only as I write it. I can’t begin it until the people come alive, and I could never write a full outline until after it is finished. A brief paragraph about the idea may be enough to interest an editor. He may need an outline to sell it to the publisher, but that can be ignored once the contract is signed. With the story free to find its own way, I can write it with the same sense of discovery and surprise that I hope the reader will feel.
—Jack Williamson
Jack Williamson addressed the following letters to Frederik Pohl in 1950-51, synopsizing various story ideas in different stages of completion. Pohl had been the editor of
Astonishing Stories
and
Super Science Stories
in earlier years, and had become a successful literary agent, in addition to being an accomplished science fiction author himself. Pohl would later become editor of the popular magazines
Galaxy Science Fiction
and
Worlds of If
.
Williamson and Pohl had a working relationship by the early 1950’s, and sometimes Pohl would propose his own ideas to see if that would trigger anything. I could not locate Pohl’s emails back to Williamson.
Of his “feelies” story, Williamson said, “I sold this idea to Orrin Keepnews at Simon & Schuster, somewhat to Fred’s surprise, and received a $250 advance—which would be many times that in today’s money. The plot in the letter is pretty crude. I worked out a much better one and spent a couple months doing a novel-length draft, but never got anything fit to send in. Looking back at it, I think it could have made a strong story. I simply wasn’t able to write it. I finally had to refund the advance out of the other royalties.” Upon reflection, Williamson added that the idea was “elaborated considerably, maybe too much.”
Some stories are subjected to over-baking, and a writer must be brave enough to stand back and simplify, cutting chunks of ideas that he or she has fallen in love with, for the betterment of the whole.
“I tried to make it a satire on the motion picture industry and the personal cost of stardom,” Williamson continued. “I tried to base it on the myth that Sir James Frasier [sic] researched in
The Golden [Bough]
. The primitive fertility custom in which the victim is treated like a king for a year, sacrificed, and the body parts planted to ensure next year’s crops. Elements of it survive in the Christian Easter. I still think there’s a strong story in the material. Perhaps I was trying to do too many things. Anyhow, I somehow failed to unify it around a convincing sense of human experience.”
A writer should never be afraid to give up on a piece that isn’t working out as planned. And bouncing ideas off of other writers, editors, or agents (providing you have the right relationship with them) can help to illuminate your path, even if their opinion is different from yours. And do not worry about your great idea being “taken.”
“The amateur thinks ideas are precious and apt to be stolen,” Williamson said. “Actually, they’re common. What matters is the ability to do something with them. [John W.] Campbell used to give the same idea to everybody, on the theory that the resulting stories would be so different that he could use them all—if they met the standard.”
Case in point, Williamson’s synopsis about the shape-shifting replica human bears a resemblance to John W. Campbell’s now-famous novella,
Who Goes There?
published two years prior. Particularly where Williamson wrote, “The hero, after being eaten and duplicated, is killed by the rival groups, but he comes back to life. He does things while he thinks he is asleep—such as flowing into a hideous slime and eating the girl, who later reappears as another replica.” In the novella
Who Goes There?,
Campbell (writing as Don A. Stuart) introduced an alien that could replicate other creatures in their exact likeness by absorbing them. He thus introduced one of the most frightening creatures in the history of literature. While that story had inspired the 1951 movie
The Thing From Another World
, the creature had been completely reimagined into something easier for special effects of the time. But in 1982, Universal Pictures more faithfully adapted
Who Goes There?
into John Carpenter’s
The Thing
, now a cult classic. One of the only similarities between the two adaptations is referring to the creature as “the thing.” In 1950, Williamson referred to his creature similarly: “He still apparently has his own body and his own mind—though vague thoughts of the Thing creep into his consciousness now and then.…”
“The shape-changing story still looks tempting,” Williamson said about this synopsis. “It could make a good horror novel. I don’t recall any response from Fred. Getting a story going requires a nice fit of several elements. The idea itself. A feeling in the writer that it expresses something he wants to say—often it can symbolize a solution to some unconscious conflict. A confidence that a market exists. Writing is communication. That requires an audience, the expectation of a feedback, hopefully in the form of a contract, a check, and the sense of an appreciative readership. We are social beings. Writing gives the satisfying sense of belonging to society. Maybe the idea just didn’t ring a bell with Fred.
“My own novel,
Darker Than You Think
(1940) was another early adventure with the shape-changing theme. My hero becomes a giant snake, a pterodactyl, finally a werewolf.”
Apparently none of the story ideas in these letters led to a finished novel, but his ongoing relationship with Frederik Pohl resulted in many novel collaborations in the years to come.
Pohl passed away in 2013.
—CSH
Dear Fred,
Your suggestion for an atomic murder story has had me thinking, and I’m beginning to think that something might be done with the idea that might be very successful—perhaps even with such a market as the SEP—if it were developed along the proper lines. But, since I haven’t had much experience in this field, I’d like your reaction to this:
The hero is a young nuclear physicist, who has just left his job at Los Alamos, probably because he didn’t like the bureaucracy in charge or had ideas about the future of atomic energy in conflict with those of the AEC—point of entry here for the theme of the story, whatever it is to be.
Anyhow, the hero is spending his first night outside at a tourist court in Santa Fe, waiting for his wife to join them—she has been on a trip east or something, and they’re going to his new academic or private industrial job together.
Sleepless that night, his thoughts flashing back to her and to his reasons for leaving the weapons project, he sees a blue flash in the room. Doesn’t think much of it, until an hour or so later he is nauseated, sick in the bathroom. Then he knows it was a real dose of radiation.
He has no Geiger counters or any other equipment of the sort, but he does have a loaded camera, and he takes that to a friend of his in town, a young doctor who was formerly with the Manhattan project, but is now in private practice. The doctor takes blood count, urinalysis—lets hero listen to radiation from his own body clicking in counters. Develops film, which is blackened. Doctor tells him he has a heavy dose, probably lethal, wants him to report to the hospital on the hill.
Hero, however, knowing that very little can be done for him, wants to know who killed him, and why. He realizes that in the absence of a cyclotron or something of the kind, the radiation must have come from a sample of fissionable material, which could only have been stolen from the project.
Thinking along those lines, he is already afraid to report what has happened. Anybody in position to steal plutonium would also be in position to learn of the report—and he knows what the consequences of that might be.
Borrowing a Geiger counter from the doctor, the physicist returns to the tourist court. The counter shows strong radioactivity still coming from one wall of room. Entering adjoining cabin, now empty, he finds “hot” lead bricks used to beam the deadly radiation at him. Murderers, however, have removed rest of equipment and themselves. He sets out, with counter, to run them down.
The reason he can’t ask for aid from the Security Service guards or the FBI is that he soon uncovers additional information to confirm his fear that the criminals are expert scientists, who have planned to use the stolen plutonium to blow up the whole Los Alamos laboratory, and the fear that any alarm would make them do so at once.
The doctor, who has been helping him, is soon murdered—preferably with a massive dose of radiation, which kills him at once.
The wife, arriving, is abducted by the enemy (or perhaps has already been abducted, which is why she didn’t meet him) and when she does turn up she is loaded with an appalling confession that she and the doctor and her husband had engineered the whole plot themselves, for private profit.
Finally, as the desperate and dying physicist runs down the plotters, he finds that the scheme was engineered by an efficient and brilliant Russian spy: a fanatical, cold-blooded man with military experience, who has been masquerading as an artist with a studio up in the hills as near as possible to Los Alamos. His assistants include a German physicist who has been broken in the concentration camps, and the fellow-traveling American in the project who stole the plutonium for him, a few grams at a time (this last a pretty soft-headed, contemptible character.)
While the actual detonating mechanism of a Bomb—besides the relatively small mass of plutonium required—is too massive to steal, these people have built detonating equipment of their own, installed in a mine shaft near the studio, which is all set to blow the top of “the hill” and leave America deprived of the atom bomb in the war for which that detonation will be the signal.
The physicist, working alone, will be required to prevent that explosion and recover the stolen plutonium.
The Geiger counter is one useful bit of equipment in the investigation—since the enemy have contaminated themselves and their equipment with a good deal of radioactivity, in the course of their effort to murder the hero.
Motive for that was, in the beginning, just a mistaken fear that he was on their trail. When he came down from the hill and moved into the tourist court where some of the plotters were staying, they thought he was after them. They rigged up equipment to give him lethal shot through wall, and then departed.
Later, when the clever major learned what had happened, he worked over the abducted wife with his expert secret police methods, to get her to make confession involving hero, in order to throw pursuit off trail until he can blow up the laboratory.
In the end, after the explosion is averted—it wouldn’t be a bad idea if all the villains had got a fatal dose themselves—doctors at a hospital give hero a fair chance to recover (he hadn’t got quite so much as he supposed.)
(Alternative development—that the radiation blast in the tourist court was entirely accidental, resulting from a test of some of the equipment, and that the Red major has since carried stoically on with his plot, despite the fact that he, too, is dying—I rather like that, as giving an impression of the stern devotion of Communists to the Cause.)
What do you think of that? I’m undecided, myself, about using communists for villains, and about the plot to blow up Los Alamos—which all looks pretty trite and melodramatic. But on the other hand, the greatest actual danger to the secrets of the bomb is from Reds, and the best use of a stolen bomb would be to blow up the bomb factory.