{"id":10229,"date":"2004-07-18T01:51:21","date_gmt":"2004-07-18T01:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/samhilliard.com\/wordpress?p=10229"},"modified":"2004-07-18T01:51:21","modified_gmt":"2004-07-18T01:51:21","slug":"tired-in-a-good-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/2004\/07\/18\/tired-in-a-good-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Tired in a good way"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I spent the day revising the synopsis for the Ridge Runner.  There was a rough draft rusting away on my PC, but it was time for a high gloss finish.<\/p>\n<p>A synopsis demonstrates to an agent or an editor that there is a logical plot to the novel.  Typically, they are 250-500 words in length.  Since it&#8217;s difficult to reduce a year&#8217;s worth of work to a single page on demand, most editors advise having a pitch worthy synopsis before writing the novel.  Great advice, but difficult to implement in practice.<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s what I learned today&#8230;<br \/>\n1) The query letter shows you can write<br \/>\n2) The synopsis shows you have a story<br \/>\n3) The chapters shows you can deliver the story<\/p>\n<p>Note the order of the items.  The query letter gets the agent&#8217;s attention.  But before the agent dives into the chapters, they have a clear synopsis in hand.  Why?  Because anything else wastes their time.  Reading 50 pages of double spaced 12 point Courier takes roughly 30 minutes.  Even if the agent devotes 1 day to reading chapters, they could consider a maximum of 15-20 prospects a week.  But with a synopsis, they can evaluate a project in under 2 minutes and then allocate time to read the chapters that pique their interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spent the day revising the synopsis for the Ridge Runner. There was a rough draft rusting away on my PC, but it was time for a high gloss finish. A synopsis demonstrates to an agent or an editor that there is a logical plot to the novel. Typically, they are 250-500 words in length. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}