Boil Your Book: A Synopsis Worksheet

Struggling to write that dreaded synopsis? Try boiling your book.

Pause for a moment and imagine yourself at a doctor’s office where diagrams of skeletal, musculature, and nervous systems are displayed on the wall  – reassuring you the physician knows what all your pokey, slimy, and noodly bits are called, while simultaneously giving you an unsettling view of all your pokey, slimy, and noodly bits.

Wait, why am I mentally walking you through low-grade body horror when you’re here to simply write a synopsis?

Well, it’s because stories are bodies.

Similar to how your skeleton prevents you from dropping into a gooey pile of skin and muscles on the floor, plot gives your novel a framework upon which you can grow your characters, themes, and prose.

With the muscular system, your meat wads contract to yank your bones around, much like how your protagonist’s actions and decisions will propel the plot forward.

While your nervous system is flitting that toe itch up to your brain, your characters are over there giving first-person POVs of parkouring off dragons, causing your readers’ heart rates to ramp.

Meanwhile, your skin wraps up all these layers prettily, as does your prose.

So, when an agent or publisher asks for your synopsis, what they’re asking for is your novel’s skeleton – picked clean of all that other gunk. They want to make sure that underneath all the fleshy bits, there isn’t some sort of eldritch skeletal horror lurking with four spines, a single pogostick of a leg, and a sea-urchin of a skull. In short, they need to know if the skeleton of your story is sound enough to carry all the other systems atop it.

The question then becomes, how does one boil a body a book down to its skeleton? By returning to the basics that formed the skeleton in the first place. Like bones, most stories follow the same fundamental structure. In order to help you “boil your book,” I’ve created the following worksheet, which focuses on pulling out the bones, one at a time, while helping you ignore everything else:

Step 1: Answer each question below with a max of 1-2 sentences each (yes, over-using conjunctives is cheating). Focus solely on the question and explain nothing beyond it.

• OPTIONAL: What event starts off your story? (Include if your first chapter/prologue opens with a significant event, like finding a dead body).
• OPTIONAL (for SFF): What is a fundamental, need-to-know aspect of your fantastical world? (e.g., the story takes place in an off-world space colony / the magic system is based entirely upon blood)
• What is life normally like for your protagonist(s)?
• What disrupts your protagonist’s normal life?
• Following the disruption, what choice must the protagonist make? What are the stakes?
• What does your protagonist want at this point? (Hint: this is your major dramatic question)
• What action/choice does the protagonist make that irreversibly changes their life / the story? (Hint: this is the point of no return / end of Act I)
• What complication/consequence happens because of that action/choice?
• What major event challenges the protagonist’s goal and causes the story to shift into a new direction? (Hint: this is your midpoint)
• What action does the protagonist take to get closer to their goal?
• What setback occurs that makes your protagonist’s desired outcome seem exceptionally bleak? (Hint: this is your darkest hour / end of Act II)
• What is the final action your protagonist takes to reach their goal? What are the stakes? (Hint: this is your climax)
• What is the outcome of that action? (Hint: this is your story’s resolution)

Step 2: Now that you’ve answered each of these questions succinctly, it’s time to arrange it all into a synopsis. Smoosh your answers together and tidy up the document, but make sure it’s not one giant paragraph! Remember to bold characters’ names when they first appear.

Step 3: Pretend you’re an agent reading through this for the first time. What information is lacking to make this readthrough coherent? What information is absolutely essential to understanding your story that didn’t make it in yet? Add those details.

Step 4: Have a reader who’s unfamiliar with your story read your synopsis. Ask them if any parts are confusing – if yes, add in more information and repeat this step until no head-scratching remains.

Step 5: Go at this like an editor-vampire who needs ink to live – every single word must be essential to understanding the story, otherwise, excise it! Finish up with some polishing, and boom!

That’s it! You’ve boiled your book down to its bones.