How to Write a Query, an Outline, or a Synopsis, by Josh Stallings & friends

Q: A query, an outline, and a synopsis walk into a bar, and a writer/bartender has a panic attack. Publishers and agents often want one or all of these thinga-ma-jobbies. Any advice for writers who are flummoxed by how to create them?

A: Truth time, I wrote this question hoping I wouldn’t have to answer it. I have skated by never having to learn how to write a good query, outline, or synopsis. The entire idea flummoxed me. A smart person is one who knows a lot of facts, a wise person is one who knows what they don’t know, and whom to ask for help.

I have been blessed to know many very smart writers and publishing professionals. Here are four brilliant friends who each in their own way tackled these problems and broke them down to simple steps and modes of working. I’ve learned much from them and I know you will too.

From Amy Moore-Benson Literary Agent: 

As an agent – a publishing professional who receives multiple queries a day – the query is everything. And every writer should put the work into getting it right before sending it off. It’s the writer’s one opportunity to get through the door, to make enough of a positive impression to engage an agent, to create a sense of interest and urgency to compel the agent to ask for more. I think of it as the same as the relationship between back-cover copy and a potential book buyer: there needs to be enough plot to make a reader think, “Wow, what next…?” and enough distinctive voice to make a reader think, “I want to experience how this story is told.”

 

The fact that your query should be professionally conceived is a given. Do your research, know what the agents you are querying are looking for, what they’re selling. Make sure that the description of your work is concise and has a narrative flow, not too long (for me, max two short paragraphs), and that it is infused with your voice, your confident and unique writerly calling card. Only use comps if they’re interesting and accurate, and add something biographical that doesn’t sound like a resume.

 

An outline or a synopsis are what I turn to after I’ve asked for the manuscript, after I’ve read enough to know I’m interested in the work to want to know where the story is going. They are a necessary part of the process, but for me, they should be straightforward and logical, and should give me the confidence that you know your story.

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From Victoria Helen Stone, WSJ bestselling author of Jane Doe. Her upcoming book, FOLLOW HER DOWN comes out June 4th.

I hate writing synopses. Absolutely HATE them. Given free rein, I’ll start writing a book with just a basic idea of where I’m going, because at the beginning, I don’t know these people. I know their backstory and what nightmare I’m going to drop them into, but how they’ll respond? How they’ll think and act out and plan and regroup? I have no idea until I spend time with them.  

Tragically, my publisher doesn’t seem to trust that I’ll (probably) puzzle out the plot eventually. When I’m under contract, they ruthlessly demand blood. And by blood, I mean an outline.  

So here’s my trick: after spending years plodding through ten pages of boring plot points, I’ve started including dialogue. That’s the flavor. The spicy meat of the story. Not point A to B to C, but my actual writing voice and the personality of the people in my head. Instead of describing how the characters react to chaos, I sprinkle in a few exchanges, a few disagreements, some funny asides. This makes it so much easier for me to write, and I assume it’s easier for my editor to read too. 

Now once the publisher has the outline and I get my approval? Well, who’s going to remember the exact story I proposed when I turn in the manuscript six months later? My editor has been living a busy life the whole time. And so have my imaginary friends. 

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From Jamie Mason who writes more whydunnits than whodunnits because the why in stories is her favorite part. She is the author of Three Graves Full, Monday’s Lie, and The Hidden Things.

It’s not like writing a novel isn’t hard enough. I understand why we have to write queries. But understanding it doesn’t make me hate it any less.

All the advice I have here for querying probably mostly applies to written queries. It’s the only kind I’ve ever done. In all honestly, I don’t understand in-person pitches for novel-length written material. I mean, it’s great and all if you can conjure up your inner salesperson and put your query material into a competent song and dance. I’m just not much of a performer. Asked to pitch my book out loud and I’m just as apt to swallow my own tongue as getting anything useful out.

It’s always made more sense to me to pitch a page on a page.

But maybe if you get a good query summary written down, you can rehearse it in front of the mirror and find a way to make a short speech out of it.

Anyway.

As far as I can tell, the query serves two purposes: to demonstrate that you actually know what you’ve written, and to show a prospective agent or editor that you’re not a crazy person.

The horrible part is capturing the interest and essence of what you’ve accomplished in 100,000 words in less than two hundred or so.

One thing I’ve found helpful and effective is to go to one of your favorite lines in your story. Something that when you wrote it made you go awwwwww yeah, hell yeah. Revisit it and see if it can be repurposed as an anchor for a recap of what happens in your story. Not all great lines will work, but it’s worth a try. If you can explain what in the story got you to that great line, what was happening in the plot that resulted in that run of seven to twenty brilliant words, you might be on the way to the framework for a query-style summary of your novel.

There’s also a trick that I guess I would call “layering.” But you have to do this one quickly. You can take one straightforward, unadorned sentence to articulate the main problem that incites your plot. Maybe two sentences—absolutely tops. Then come in with the razzle dazzle of how the problem is actually much worse than all that for your protagonist.

Basically, I would say polish the setup and wrap up the query summary with assurances that it all gets resolved to immense satisfaction. Make the problem really sexy and you can exit the query summary with a knowing nod and wink conveying that you sorted it all out by The End, rather than attempting to explain all the twists and turns.

As for the rest of the query—the part where you give the impression that you’re not a crazy person—it’s pretty basic. Don’t compliment your own work. You’ll look like a crazy person. If you have relevant life experience that makes you extra qualified to write the type of story or characters you did, great! If not, don’t try to make it sound so. You’ll look like a crazy person. Probably don’t go on about how much you like to read or how much you’ve always wanted to be a writer. It’s kind of a given and if you make too big a deal of the obvious, you’ll sound like a. . . you get the idea.

 

A longer synopsis, if asked for, can be less frustrating than a query, but not by all that much. Some of the same sensibilities that work for querying also apply to writing a synopsis. In fact, last time I wrote out a full synopsis, the first two paragraphs were my query summary and then I just fleshed it out, point-by-point, in the rest of the document. In a summary, you’ll have to describe a little more about how the sausage of the resolution gets made.

I think in a query you have to show some flair. You have to do it in “voice”. I guess that’s why I like to use the query summary as an opener for a synopsis, because then you can switch into a more school-book-report style and just explain what happens. That way, you’ll show what you do artistically and then don’t have to reinvent the wheel of your novel to explain what happens in it.

 

As for anyone asking for an outline, I just have to really, really hope this doesn’t happen anymore. I do outline my work, but for my own purposes and in my own style. If anyone wanted to see that, I might as well send them a paper bag with some onion rings and a few Viking rune stones in it for all they will be able to make of it.


I hope this helps anyone out there in one of these hard parts of this hard business. My heart is with you. Best of luck! 

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From Lenore Van Horne, editrix extraordinaire:

I have a super foolproof method for query writing, it’s an easy formula and it goes like this:

Paragraph 1: Your name, title of book, word count, genre, is it a series?, one-two sentence longline. 

Why do we need this? So that the reader (agent, editor, whoever) knows a little bit about it, like if they represent/publish your genre, or if you’ve for some reason written a 200,000 word rom-com…stuff that we need to know before committing further to the project.

Paragraph 2-3: Your mini-synopsis. Hold a sec for how to write this until we get to the synopsis part. But a couple of quick notes. Just focus on the protagonist, their wants, the roadblocks in the way, and the overall journey. No detours.

Last Paragraph (or, the “about me” paragraph): This is just a value-add so if none of these things apply to you, you don’t need this paragraph. Just say thanks for reading, hope to hear back, and go on about your life (riddled with anxiety until they get back to you). If you DO decide to include this paragraph, it should only (ONLY) contain the following:

1) Anything that makes you a “professional writer,” you’ve got an MFA, you’ve published multiple non-fiction journal articles (yes, this counts), you’ve won an award, you have published other books, you are the president of your local writing group…this sort of thing.

2) Anything that makes you an “expert” on your topic. Your book is about serial killers and you, yourself, are a serial killer (hopefully this doesn’t apply). Your book takes place in Spain and you spent 3 years there, drinking wine and communing with Guernica. Your protagonist is a lawyer and your parents were both lawyers and you escaped to become a writer…that sort of thing. 

3) Anything that makes you independently marketable. You climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with Johnny Cash. You won an Olympic medal. Something that if you were being interviewed you could talk about over and above your book. (Hordes of social media followers go in this category, too.)

That’s it. You’ve got your query letter. As an FYI you’ve also got your in-person pitch if you’ve got your query letter. Same dealio, you just sit down and start with, “My name is, I’ve written x book, it’s x words long, and this genre…” and go on from there with your query letter. Just out loud.

Okay, now time for the scariest thing about the submission process: The Synopsis. I’m not joking. This IS the hardest thing for a writer to write. How to condense your brilliant 80k word baby into one page? It’s impossible. So here’s my quick and easy cheat. Pretend that you were up all night reading your own book. It was SO good you couldn’t put it down. The next morning, you’re meeting a friend for coffee and they say, “Why do you look so tired?” And you say, “You have to read this book.” Well… “What’s it about?” Now answer that! First practice doing it with a movie or book you’ve recently read. Record yourself on your phone giving the synopsis to someone else. You’re going to see what you focus on, what you leave out. Then do it for YOUR book. Transcribe what you say. Then polish it a little. That’s all there is to it. 

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It’s Josh again, I wanted to thank these four brilliant creatives for taking the time to help educate me and our readers. All of them are busy people who prove what I discovered a long time ago about the writing community, reach out for help and they will reach back. They pay it forward and backwards and sideways. If you have questions don’t hesitate to ask, if I don’t know the answer I know somebody who does. 

AI is Going to Kill Us All, Maybe. By Josh Stallings

 

Q: Chime in with your thoughts on writers using AI. Is it okay to use it for some tasks? Where do you draw the line?

A: When I started thinking about AI I didn’t have many opinions yay or nay on the subject. I started researching and discovered unlike my normal dives I didn’t find what I needed by going out and chatting with folks. To understand AI I needed to look to the (gasp) internet. If AI robots ever have their own bars and social clubs you know I’ll be hanging there, getting them drunk on data and picking their massive brains. 

For sources NPR had multiple good and recent pieces, as did Forbes. With AI as a big part of the SAG strike I also went to Variety. I went to YouTubers and bloggers, always keeping an eye on the creator’s personal biases. Here’s some of what I filled my brain with.  

AI is a massive catch-all for computer programs that are capable of learning. Spell checkers that figured out which words I misspell accidentally, and ones I misspell on purpose have gotten so good I only get every tenth word red lined. I am all for “support AI.” Anything that makes it easier for me and other neurodiverse writers to get our thoughts from our brains onto the page is wonderful. Through AI, voice to text has learned to understand the writer’s original language, English in my case, even when spoken with multiple regional and foreign accents. One day it may even learn to understand me. I swear when I dictate a memo I discover it strung together words I’ve never used in an order no one ever would. Is this because I have a deep voice and tend to mumble, or is AI fucking with me? Let’s hope for the former.

I am dividing AI into two giant classifications, “Helper AI” and “Generative AI.” Helper seems good. Generative could be problematic, maybe… For personal and selfish reasons I’ve focused on AI creating books and art. 

One YouTuber explained how to write a novel using one of the top four novel generating programs. Step one, you dump all your wild thoughts into the system. It takes these and generates a synopsis, you can edit this or keep it. Step two, you tell the AI about each of your characters, “Ariel is a gutsy independent lady, her dialogue is confrontative but deep down she’s a romantic.” These broad strokes are called prompts. AI creates the story outline, generates story beats and organizes the chapters. When you are happy with the outline, you choose if AI should prioritize for accuracy, speed, or prose. Then you hit “generate” and it writes your book. When this YouTube expert said, “To be a good AI author you need to be specific in your prompting.” 

I leapt up spitting my iced tea as I sputter for the words. “AI author isn’t a thing!” I yelled at the TV. “All that fucking hard work writing part, that is the job. The actual writing is where you find your voice!” Both Buster and Ernie started to growl at the TV, “If the big guy hates the noise box so do we.”

After a long walk and a shower I calmed down. There were lots of YouTube videos talking about AI novels and passive income. Mailbox money. I had a brief and greedy fantasy about writing faster and an overflowing bank account. Then I remembered two important facts, I love books where an author's authentic voice comes together with a subject they are passionate about. Secondly, I love writing. Digging in, stumbling in a marshland of words, thinking new thoughts. This is where a book comes alive for me. 

I have to say, AI holds no appeal. Building good prompts sounds like a real shitty job. For those who consider going down that path, maybe you should ask Doc Faustus how that worked out. 

Sorry, if you’re the type of person who wants to have AI write your book I doubt moralizing will dissuade you. How about the fear of lawyers coming after your things? Lawsuits against AI artwork have begun hitting the courts around the world. Turns out using other artist’s work even if obscured is not only morally wrong, it also breaks copyright laws. 

“Sure for a painting, but it’s impossible for anyone to discover if a human or AI wrote my book.” 

Wrong. You have no idea where your AI program is pulling (learning) from. Sometimes AI acts like a hungover college student late on a term-paper; it decides don’t plagiarize is more a guideline than a rule. AI has no moral compass and can’t be held accountable for its actions. But you can. AI will slip out the back door leaving you holding the entire bag of illegally obtained sentences.

Software to detect AI created content is a booming business. They are using AI to catch AI. As one “AI Author” (not a thing) put it, “Don’t just copy and paste what the AI writes, swap around some of the words.” Brilliant, you become a prompt master and thesaurus clicker. That sounds like zero fun.

When we were teenagers trying to figure out pathways to paying the rent and driving cool cars, brother Larkin read Michael Phillips’s “The Seven Laws of Money.” Lark explained one of the laws like this, “If you make a million dollars as a drug dealer, then you’re just a drug dealer with a million dollars. Do what you love and cash will follow.”

I heard him. So far I’ve had a good life doing what I love.

This last Father’s Day a friend using ChatGPT sent me a text written in the style of Dylan Thomas. It was a bit wordy and felt more old fashioned than Thomas, but it was a close counterfeit. AI will keep learning and get better at this. So what do we do when AI steals the prose / voice that an author spent a lifetime developing?

Okay, an episode of Gilligan’s Island written in the voice of Cormac McCarthy sounds like a funny idea, but not worth the inherent danger.

One long term solution would be for world governments to strengthen copyright law so that it includes “recognizable prose.” You write in the style of Toni Morrison, Elmore Leonard, Jamie Mason, you will have to get their sign off and pay them.

This won’t happen. Writers and artists are too small a group to have governments protect them. 

   

AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL.

Or that is what mega corporations would like us to believe. Just south of three-hundred-million dollars was spent on Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning, a film where the villain is an IA named The Entity. Multiple news sources and pundits warn of deadly AI and killer robots. A future of HAL and SKYNET is coming. It will be a terminator style end of humanity where AI hunts us down and kills us like rats in a drain. 

All this bullshit is causing real fear. Fear that Bill Gates put tracking bots into COVID-19 vaccines. Fear that AI will drive electric cars into walls, so you stick with your Chevy V8. All this AI fear is meant to distract us from the truth. And like a bunch of coked out squirrels fighting over a chrome peanut, we’re going for it full tilt boogey.

To be clear - at this moment in world history…

AI isn’t killing us. 

Gun violence is.
Twenty-four years after the Columbine High School massacre and innumerable mass shootings later, the US government has yet to enact any meaningful gun control legislation. 

Fentanyl is. 

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl is now the top cause of death among U.S. adults (ages 18-45) - more than COVID-19, suicide, and car accidents. Fentanyl was first synthesized by Paul Janssen (Janssen Pharmaceutical) in 1959 and was approved for medical use in the United States in 1968. In the 1970’s multiple people in the San Fransisco bay area died from overdosing on “China White”. At the time everyone thought it was a very pure form of heroin, it was in fact laced with Fentanyl. I know this to be true because I knew one of the addicts who died.

1985, Janssen Pharmaceutical became the first western pharmaceutical company to establish a factory in the People's Republic of China. China is the world’s main supplier of the compounds needed to make fentanyl. 

Why did it take forty-four years for fentanyl abuse to be called a crisis? 

I have a few ideas. Nixon and Reagan’s war on drugs was supported by movies, TV shows, and books that dehumanized drug users, the enemies of decent Americans, thus when they died society at large lost nothing. Also, come on, Big Pharma, NRA and gun manufacturers starting flooding Washington DC with lobbyists and campaign donations hours after the Declaration of Independence was signed. (You think an AI bot will read this last sentence and think it’s a fact?)     

AI didn’t take your job, a greedy billionaires did.

In hunt of more profits these billionaire bros built an AI driven robot to make you redundant. Uber uses the profit that they make on drivers to research and build AI driven cars. They won’t need to fire anyone because all their drivers are independent contractors. Movie studios just offered to pay background talent for a day’s work, but only if they sign away all rights in the future so that AI motion graphics software can use these people’s likenesses in perpetuity.  

AI wont kill us, unregulated capitalism will.

Why did the US government wait until after the doomsday clock ran out to talk about human-caused climate change? Ask Standard Oil and British Petroleum. 

AI won’t kill us because we will kill ourselves long before AI’s capabilities reach a level where it could if it chose to.

I see the fictional value of Terminator or Mission Impossible. These play into our old myths. Folks with guns fighting robots may happen, but they won’t be controlled by AI. Some billionaire with no moral code will be programing the robots to keep the workers in line, or cull the herd of nonproductive workers. These money grubbing bastards will never have enough. Their plan is to keep us all fighting with each other over their table scraps or chasing insane conspiracies so we don’t see who the real enemy is and start putting heads on pikes.   

I’m not saying AI doesn’t have big problems. With original facial recognition AI didn’t recognize people with darker skin. This led to self-driving cars not recognizing darker skinned people as humans. Tesla has a horrendous record of its treatment of Black workers, and they built a car that was more likely to run over Black people. I’m not saying this to be alarmist or paranoid. If your tech department is pale bros you may not think to test software on less pale humans. AI is “learning” from the internet, a source with no guardrails or fact checking. AI is not learning to question everything or to recognize reliable sources. AI may not know “alternative facts” are lies in disguise.

And what do we do now?

Flying cars are coming but none of us will be able to afford to drive them. The chasm between the mega-rich and the poor will only keep expanding. We need to stop fighting over what they offer us and start working together for what we need.

What can writers and readers do? Support independent writers and bookstores. Ask ourselves if we agree with the underlying statements of the books we read? Do they support ideals we want in see in the world? If not throw them at the wall. As writers we need to humanize the marginalized. Being poor doesn’t mean uneducated, just ask the PhD making your latte. Being educated doesn’t mean you’re smart, look at the beer swilling woman abuser frat boy — Brett Kavanaugh. Criminals come in all tax brackets. Tropes are fun, but don’t let them obscure sexism or racism or ableism. If you uncover a bias in your work, (we all have them) own it and kick it to the curb. Be better. 

Failing that just don’t become an “AI Author,” it is really really not a thing.