The Craft of Writing: Story vs Synopsis
Many beginning writers don’t write a story, they write a list of events that happen. What does that mean?A common problem a lot of novice writers fall into is sweating and struggling to finish a story, then ending up with something that’s far too short to be a novel. They reach the end and discover their book is only 20,000 or 30,000 words long, and they feel that’s much too short, but they don’t know what to do.
Sometimes, this is simply a matter of writing lean...producing terse prose that doesn’t include the cues that help bring the reader into the story and give the reader a sense of being in the story’s heading. I wrote a guide to extending scenes by including more information here and a guide to extending scenes by controlling pacing here, but sometimes, it’s not about detail or pacing, it’s a problem that comes from writing a synopsis in place of a story.
Beginning writers often treat a story as a sequence of events: this happened, then this happened, then this happened. When you do that, you don’t end up with a story, you end up with a synopsis of a story. They are not the same thing.
That’s why the work ends up so short.Let me give you a concrete example of how this can happen. This is not a story:
The alarm went off. It was early in the morning. Sally was tired. The room was cold when she woke up. Her head was hurting, because she was partying the night before. Sally was not looking forward to work. She grumbled when she took a shower.
That’s about on par with what a first-time writer might write, and like I said, it’s not a story.
image: Bruno van der Kraan
A story draws the reader into the world by inviting the reader into the character’s experience. It might look more like this:
She jolted awake at her alarm clock’s shrill electronic cry, visions of strange creatures with sleek gray bodies gliding beneath a stormy sea already shattering into dust behind her eyes. By the time her fumbling fingers found the alarm, the dream had already faded, driven away by the throbbing in her head. The alarm clock tumbled to the floor, its shrieking silenced.
Sally forced her eyes open. Cold morning light filtered through frilly blue curtains, bringing with it neither warmth nor clarity. What on earth had possessed her to go out on a work night?
A fragment of memory fell into her head. Donovan. Of course it’d been Donovan. He’d called her, eager in that way only he could be, talking in that rapid-fire way he did whenever he was excited about something, an underground rave in a warehouse by the docks, a DJ he knew she loved…how could she say no to that?
She sprawled in her bed, splayed out, still half-dressed, savoring the image of a pale-skinned girl in black latex with dark eyes and ruby lips, kissing her as they swayed to a trance beat. She hadn’t even learned her name. In that place, at that moment, it didn’t seem important. Sally raised her fingertips to her lips, smiling at the memory.
The alarm clock screamed at her again from the floor, shattering her reverie. She knew, of course. Last night, she knew, even as Donovan prattled on, she knew there’d be a price to pay. Past her dismissed it as a problem for future her to deal with. Now that future her had become present her, past her seemed a selfish bitch.
Story of her life.
She rose with a muttered imprecation against the gods of insufficient sleep and the unfairness of it all. In the shower, needle-sharp jets of water blasted away the last traces of the night, marooning her in the bleak reality of a day in a cubicle beneath sterile LED lights, writing reports that would go up the chain to Marcus, second assistant manager and her boss, where they’d be filed, cross-referenced, and forgotten.
If you’ve produced a story that feels like it ought to be a novel but comes up quite short, it might be that what you’ve written is more of a synopsis than a story, an extremely terse series of things that happen without any emotional impact, because you’re just jumping from event to event to event without bringing the reader into the world or the experiences of the characters.
The good news is that expanding that synopsis into a proper story can easily triple or quadruple your word count, in addition to making your story more satisfying to read.