Romance Writers of America was in New York this year.  The hub of publishing.  It was an awesome conference, and I was lucky enough to be invited to speak.  This year, I delivered a Reader's Digest version of the workshop that Laura Baker and I developed, Discovering Story Magic using the movie, Good Will Hunting as a template.  Discovering Story Magic is a three-step method for creating a story they can't refuse.  The story is created from the characters up.

Now, I'm the first to admit--and those of you who read my blog know--I plan my books.  The great thing about Discovering Story Magic (DSM) is that it can be used after-the-fact to revise and fine-tune your book. I'm not going to go into the entire workshop here.  There are packets available on the Discovering Story Magic website--100-page packets that analyze several different movies using DSM.  However, today, I thought I'd provide a chart that compares several plotting methods as well as a link to the presenatation I gave at RWA in New York (especially for those who wanted the Self-Image worksheet).

There's nothing worse than writing a synopsis...is there?  I haven't found it.  My first piece of advice on writing a synopsis is...get someone else to do it :-).  Seriously, as a writer, we love too much of our book to ever boil it down to its key elements.  My other bit of advice is to write it before you write the book...that way, you don't know what you don't know yet :-).  Of course, that's not always possible...either way, however, I have found a quick recipe for writing a short synopsis.  I hope it helps some of you.  It sure helped me.

The way things are going in the marketplace, most selling synopses are 5 pages or less, no matter what the length of the book.  Here's how I do it.  That being said, there are as many ways to write as there are writers, so take what you want and leave the rest.