I've been working on a contest entry all afternoon, taking into account my own edits, as well as the comments of my CP. That was the easy part. It was the @#%$! synopsis that got me hung up.

Boiling my living, breathing story down to a dry blow-by-blow of the high points is mind-numbing and BORING! I'll admit, it can bring some plot holes to light, and it will probably be easier when I start applying what I've learned about structure to my future MSs, but I'm not sure I'll ever love writing them.

To make things worse, the contest I'm entering requires a max synopsis word count of 675! That's just about two pages. Who knew I could be so economical with words? I managed to cut it from an already spare 950 down to 668 (just for good measure). With only two pages, it can be hard to shoehorn in the motivations clearly. I find myself leaving out whole chunks of stuff, but maybe that's better.

It misses some of the richness of the complete story, but it's far easier if I don't have to explain why the heroine is at odds with her father and later asks him for money. Is it important? Kind of. Is it pivotal? Guess not.

We'll see what my CP thinks.

How do you handle the synopsis? (Except you, Christine. I have the handout!) 😉