If you think I am going to be personally giving you tips here on writing  a synopsis, well, hate to disappoint. But I am going to provide a couple links to a site with a particular article that I found quite enlightening.

To date, the stories I have submitted to editors and agents at the NJ SCBWI conferences and workshops have been picture books, as I wish to, (ideally anyway), both write and illustrate. However, one of my PB stories was looked at by an editor awhile back and her comment was that there was too much backstory for a PB, and she felt I would do much better with it as a chapter book. This, of course, sent me into researching what chapter books were all about, reading a bunch, and re-working this particular story. Chapter books also have lots of illustration opportunity, so this is still a good thing.

I am submitting this for the June Conference at NJ SCBWI. If you’re anywhere in the area and able to attend, do go and learn more about this wonderful opportunity to meet editors and agents, and learn a bundle about this field. I am very pleased to be meeting with an editor that had critiqued this story at a first-page session last year, and had some good things to say. Now I shall find out if I’ve gotten 15 pages of it right. 

What needs to accompany these 15 pages is a synopsis, something I’ve not had to be concerned about with a picture book. So after asking fellow writers, reading up on the subject and searching the web for the best way to write a synopsis, I came across a two part article on the blog of Rachelle Gardner, a literary agent for Wordserve Literary. The article is written by one of her clients, Gordon Carroll, who does something no one else has done — he shows us how to write a synopsis on a story we all know, Bambi. Excellent idea.

Carroll’s using a well-known tale in developing the stages of the synopsis has made it so much easier to approach this new challenge. I’m actually now looking forward to it!  Here are Writing A Synopsis, Part 1 and Writing A Synopsis, Part 2.  Hope it may be of help to you.

As for that photo? Where I hope I’ll be doing some of my writing tomorrow … on my back porch!

Here’s where I’ve hitched my star – writing and illustrating children’s books – picture books,  chapter books. Yet belonging to a writer’s group and SCBWI, in the company of readers and writers of other children’s genres, I find myself being drawn to those I don’t write… MG and YA fiction. And what a draw it is. My local librarian and I were discussing some of our mutual interests, and she recommended the YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. I was just blown away by this book and can’t wait to read more by its author.  

Although I have a fair amount of factual information about what life is like on an Indian  reservation, I, as a white person in a predominantly white culture, cannot possibly know the daily challenges and ongoing pain of rez life.  Sherman Alexie, a Spokane Indian, brings this to light in a way that is both tragically sad and wryly funny.  I actually found this to be, on the one hand, one of the saddest books I have read in a long, long time, as the main character, Arnold – known as Junior on the rez – loses family member after family member to the direct or indirect results of the alcoholism that is epidemic there. Yet the comic style in which Alexie writes can at times make one not quite realize fully the tragedies he’s describing. Quite a feat.  I was quickly drawn in to Junior’s first person narrative beginning with his severe health problems up to age 7 and his continuous struggle to survive and ultimately make something of himself. Along with my feeling his pain, I could not help but cheer him on and/or comfort him, through everything he experiences.

When Junior receives his 7th grade math book to find his mother’s maiden name written inside, he knows he has no choice but to leave, to go off-rez to an all white school 22 miles away.  Here he truly starts a new chapter of his own life. Although deeply resented by his entire tribe for it, Junior leaves the reservation to make a future for himself, and in this move, becomes a phenomenally brave main character. 

Junior’s character is  insightful, honest, humble, (if not self-effacing like any typical teenager), and in spite of a life infused with hardship, incredibly funny. While he describes the problems and pain that are simply life on the reservation, he never fails to also describe the love and devotion of his family, his best friend Rowdy, and his tribe.  I found Alexie’s style of relating such profound hurt mitigated with clever wit to be amazing, and I truly could not put this book down. 

Last night, I looked further into the author, Sherman Alexie, finding some very interesting videos, among them, one of his receiving the 2007 National Book Award. I watched another of his being interviewed on a PBS station, where he revealed how autobiographical The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian really is – almost entirely.  To watch Alexie was to better understand his character and his book. He began as a poet and wrote short stories and a few screenplays as well. (He wrote the screenplay for Smoke Signals, a movie based on one of his short stories.) This is Alexie’s first YA novel. He discussed in the interview how thrilled he was that so many teens resonated with Arnold/Junior. Not just teens, I’m sure. He already added this fan to his base in just one book, and I look forward to reading more from this terrific author.