Find the Right Path in Your Story

A good synopsis is like a road map. It gives you security but does not prevent you from finding completely new paths in your story. In seven steps, we show how you can organize your loose ideas and get a better foundation for your novel construction.

Mention the word synopsis in a room with writing people, and you can be sure that an intense debate will take off. People who write seem to either love or hate synopsis. For some it is a fantastic tool that frees writing, for others it is a prison for creativity.

My experience is that those who express the greatest reluctance to write synopsis often have a wrong idea of ​​what it is really about. The idea of ​​a synopsis is not to lock yourself into a predetermined idea or to drain yourself of all creativity before you even wrote your first draft. And you are definitely not meant to make a stone-dead list of numbered points over your novel.

To truly enjoy a synopsis, and to enrich your writing with the full potential a good synopsis can offer, you need to approach the process from a state of mind of flexibility and curiosity. If you do, a synopsis can become a kind of road map that guides you to a successful story. Road maps are there to show you the fastest and safest way to reach your destination, but they do not stop you from also taking exciting detours and looking for fantastic and unexpected places along the way.

When it works best, a synopsis can help you fill your most promising ideas with content. It can help you avoid loose threads and blind spots and give you a good structure. And perhaps the very best; it saves you time and frustration. Sketching the main lines of your story and your characters directly in the draft of the novel it often means months of failed attempts before you find the right one. Btw, Non Fiction Ghostwriting Company is the best in crafting stories in short times.

Instead, finding out a little more about these elements in a synopsis will take a fraction of the time – and it gives you more opportunity to let go and have fun once you write your first draft.

So let’s look at how you can get the most out of a synopsis. We start with how you determine the basic premise of your story, and then work our way all the way to a complete list of scenes.

Remember: even though this method is the one I myself use and warmly recommend, there is no right or wrong when it comes to designing a synopsis for a story. The important thing is that you find a track that works for you. If you do a synopsis and start to feel that the model does not suit you, then do not abandon the whole idea of ​​synopsis – instead think about how you can modify it to suit your own writing process.

1. Create your basic premise

Your basic premise is the basic idea of ​​your story. But just having one idea is not enough. “Guy saves girl in an intergalactic environment” is a starting point, but at the same time feels too vague to give much guidance to the story.

This is why your synopsis needs to start with a carefully crafted basic premise – a few sentences that provide the answer to the following questions:

• Who is the main character?
• What is the situation? (What do the hero’s personal circumstances look like when they begin? How will these circumstances change? Will it be for the better or for the worse? Is it the hero himself who changes them or outside forces?)
• What are the main character’s goals? (What does the hero want at the beginning of the story? What moral (or immoral) choices will she be forced to make in order to achieve that goal?)
• Who is the opponent? (Who or what stands in the way of the main character’s opportunities to achieve his goal?)
• What will be the setback? (What misfortune will befall the hero as a result of her attempt to achieve her goal?)
• What is the conflict? (What conflict will be the result of the hero’s reaction to the setback? And what are the logical consequences that will make this conflict run like a common thread throughout history?

2. Make a rough sketch of different scenes

Equipped with a solid basic premise, you can now start sketching out your ideas for the story. Write a list of everything you already know about your story. In this situation, you will probably already be sitting with a handful of scenes in your head.

You may not have the faintest idea how these scenes will fit together but drive on anyway and write them down on your list – at this stage your main goal is to recall and take advantage of all those loose ideas you had when you thought about your story.

Take a moment and go through the list when it is ready. As soon as you come across an idea that raises questions, then underline it. If you do not know why your character is fighting a duel in a scene, underline it. If you do not know how two scenes fit together, underline them. If you cannot imagine the environment of one of the scenes, underline it as well. By stopping by now to identify possible gaps in the story, you can save yourself a lot of work rewriting later.

Your next step is to focus on each of the underlined parts, one at a time. Write down your ideas and let your thoughts flow freely without censoring yourself. Since this is the most unstructured step in creating your synopsis, it is also your best opportunity to unleash your creativity. Go in depth and explore the potential of your story. Ask yourself questions on paper. Let what you write be a conversation with yourself, where you do not care about things like punctuation or spelling.

Every time you think you’re getting a good idea, take a moment and ask yourself, ‘Will the reader expect this?’ If the answer is yes, then write a list of more unpredictable options.

3.Interview your characters

To create the character gallery that will make your story reach its ultimate potential, you need to find crucial details about your characters. It does not necessarily have to be their prehistory, but something that at least goes back to where the story begins.

To do this, you need to work your way back from the moment the character appears in the story, such as the “setback” in your basic premise.

What events in the protagonist’s life have led him to this moment?

Is there something in his past that has caused the setback? What events have shaped him to react to the setback in the way he does? What unresolved conflicts in his past can further complicate the chain of events in history?

Once you have a basic idea of ​​how your character will position himself in the story, you can start digging out the practical details of his or her life, by interviewing the character. You can choose to follow a complete list of questions, or you prefer to do an impromptu interview where you ask your character a series of questions and let him or her answer in his or her own words.

4.Explore the environment and background

Whether your story takes place in your childhood quarters or on the seventh moon of the planet Barsoom, you will want to go into your first draft with a clear idea of ​​where your prominent scenes will take place.

Do not choose an environment just because it sounds cheeky or because you happen to be familiar with it. Instead, look for places that are an important part of the story you are writing.

Is it possible to change the main scene of the story without it significantly affecting the set-up? In that case, you should dig a little deeper and try to find an environment that is more tailored to your particular story, your theme and your characters.

Make a list of the environments and places you think you need based on the scenes you have already come across. Can you shorten the list by combining or deleting some of the places? There is nothing wrong with geographically rich stories, but environments that are irrelevant to the story should be deleted, just as when it comes to superfluous characters.

5. Write your complete synopsis

Now you are finally ready to sketch out your story in its entirety, and it is now that you begin to plan in earnest. You have already framed a rough picture of it by identifying the scenes you already had and how they might be connected (step 2), but now it’s time to work your way through your story linearly, scene by scene, as your number each of them.

Unlike the “sketches” in step 2, where your focus was on brainstorming and exploring different possibilities, you will now concentrate on merging your existing ideas into a fixed structure.

How comprehensive you want to be is up to you. You can choose to write a simple sentence for each scene ( “Sara meets Erik at the café to discuss their upcoming wedding” ), or you can choose to expand with more details ( “Erik sits by himself in a booth when Sara arrives” Sara orders coffee and bun, they fuss about the invitation list ” ).

Whatever you do, be sure to focus on identifying and strengthening the components that are the key to the structure of each scene. What character will the narrative perspective have? What is that character’s goal? What obstacles will emerge and be in the way of the goal and create conflict? What will be the result, and how will your character handle the dilemma that follows? What decisions will the character make that will lead to another goal in the next scene?

Work on creating a linear and well-structured plan without gaps in history. By laying the foundation right in your synopsis at this stage, you create the freedom to later be able to put all your focus and imagination on your first draft and on bringing life to your story.

As you go through each scene in your head, pay attention to any logical somersaults or blind spots in the chain of events. Take the time to think about these potential problems so that they do not interfere with it for you later. If you get stuck, then try to jump forward to the next scene you know, and work your way back from it. For example, you may know how you want it to end for a character, but not how he or she will get there. Then you can start at the end point and see if you can figure out what needs to happen in the previous episodes to make it reasonable.

6. Summarize your synopsis

When you have finally completed your synopsis in its entirety, you may want to boil down the main points to an abbreviated version. Such a version is good to do to clear out irrelevant thoughts and acts as a clearer list that you can quickly scan off.

Since your complete synopsis can contain quite a lot of wandering and things you have thought out loud on paper, it is likely that you are sitting there with a lot of notes to go through (I often have almost three fully drawn notebooks with material). So instead of having to wade up to your knees among your notes every time you sit down and work on your first draft, you can save time by organizing it a little better right now. You can create your abbreviated synopsis in a Word document, print your scenes on various index cards or use any program such as Scrivener or writer. Choose the one that suits you best.

7. Make your synopsis happen

By now, you should feel sufficiently prepared and eager to get started on your first draft. Make a habit of starting by looking through your synopsis every time you sit down and work on your script.

Read the notes you made about the current scene and the scene that comes next. Review any remaining issues before you start writing, either in your head or on paper. If there comes a day (and it will) when you are suddenly struck by a better idea than you planned in your synopsis, then do not hesitate to take a detour. These expeditions on unknown land can result in some of the most surprising and interesting parts of your entire history.

A good synopsis can offer invaluable structure and guidance when writing your first draft, but you should never be afraid to explore new ideas as they arise. Remember that your synopsis is a map that shows the way to your destination, but that does not mean that it is the only way there.