THE ICE PICK

I Have This Nifty Idea : Now What Do I Do With It?, selected and edited by Mike Resnick. Holicong, Pa., Wildside Press, 2001. 405 p. $22.00. ISBN: 1-58715-481-1.

Although Resnick never mentions it, the idea for this book was suggested by our own Kathleen Woodbury, and like her OSPS : Outlines, Synopses, Proposals That Sold, it is a collection of novelists’ submissions to agents and editors that resulted in sales.

If you’re struggling with a synopsis, outline, or proposal for your own novel and wondering how published science fiction authors wrote theirs, this book shows you exactly what they did.

Some of the synopses are from well-known authors, others are from first-timers. They include: Robert Silverberg, Katharine Kerr, Jack Dann, Jack L. Chalker, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Walter Jon Williams, Laura Resnick, Charles Sheffield, Mike Resnick, Susan R. Matthews, Joe Haldeman, Jack McDevitt, Robert J. Sawyer, David Brin, Terry McGarry, Barry N. Malzberg, Alan Rodgers, Stephen Leigh, and Kevin J. Anderson.

Most of the synopses are long, but there are a few short ones, and some bonuses, as when Katharine Kerr gives her story "in a nutshell," in a two-page "Quick Summary," and also in a longer synopsis.

Most are formal proposals, but some are "informal letters to friendly editors," and most are for stand-alone novels, but there are trilogy synopses and even movie synopses, as well.

Where one or two examples in a how-to-write book can show you some of the techniques or formatting you need to know, this book, like SFFW’s own OSPS series, actually shows you how to put a synopsis together that works. (In fact, several of these authors contributed to OSPS. Mike Resnick himself was featured in Issue #2.)

In studying these synopses you see the general rules authors follow, like using third person present tense and telling how their books end. But the examples show you much more in the wide variety of approaches to the synopses, e.g., you can see that some authors dive right into the story, others give a great deal of background information first; some do chapter-by-chapter, others do not.

Although this book may be more valuable to read and study if you’ve read the particular novel featured in the synopsis, it is still extremely helpful to see how these authors encapsulated their stories, and it might even encourage you to buy some of the books you haven’t read and read them.

{Published in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, May 2005}