The Synopsis Treasury (14 page)

Connie Willis

Connie Willis is an internationally-known science fiction author and the winner of an unprecedented total of seven Nebula Awards and eleven Hugo Awards and is the first author to have ever won both awards in all four fiction categories. She has also won numerous Locus Awards (given by
Locus
Magazine), and was named by them Best Science Fiction Author of the Nineties. She has been named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and last year was made a SFWA Grand Master of Science Fiction.

Willis is the author of
Doomsday Book
, winner of the Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel;
Lincoln’s Dreams
, winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel;
Remake
;
Uncharted Territory
;
Bellwether
;
To Say Nothing of the Dog
, winner of the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and
Passage
, and the short story collections
Fire Watch
,
Impossible Things
,
Miracle and Other Christmas Stories
, and
The Winds of Marble Arch
, but she is probably most famous for her short stories, including “Fire Watch,” “Even the Queen,” and “The Last of The Winnebagos.”

Her most recent novel, a two-volume work entitled
Blackout
and
All Clear
, is set in World War II, in the middle of the evacuation of Dunkirk, the intelligence war, and the London Blitz.
Blackout
/
All Clear
recently won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel. It made the
New York Times
best seller list and was described by the
Washington Post
as “bravura storytelling by … a novelist who can plot like Agatha Christie and whose books possess a bounce and stylishness that Preston Sturges might envy.”

She is currently working on a new novel about telepathy. It is, of course, a comedy. She’s also working on a non-fiction book about romantic comedy and a short story about a mysterious bookshop.

Ms. Willis lives in Colorado with a very nice husband who collects antique sewing machines, an even nicer bulldog, and two cats who are the spawn of Satan. She loves screwball comedies, Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker, church choirs, chocolate, Mark Twain, and Andrew Lee Potts, not necessarily in that order.

Seven Tips For Writing a Synopsis

By Connie Willis

1. A synopsis should be interesting. You’re trying to get the editor to buy your book, so think jacket blurb, not book report.

BAD EXAMPLE: Hamlet is a story about a guy who’s a prince. He’s at college, and his father dies.…

GOOD EXAMPLE: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Hamlet’s father is hardly in his grave, yet his mother’s already married his uncle, there are rumors of murder, and now people are seeing ghosts…!

2. A synopsis is not a jacket blurb. Or a teaser for a soap opera. It shouldn’t end with “Will Hamlet kill his uncle? Will Ophelia kill herself? What will happen to the kingdom? Read to find out.…” The editor wants and needs to know the entire plot and especially the ending. You’re not giving anything away. This is your editor, not your readers.

3. Don’t include every detail. A synopsis should be between three and ten pages long and should only contain the major plot points and as much character background as is necessary to understand the plot.

You can include a bit of background if it will help in understanding the story. In a science fiction novel, you may need to explain time travel or how the transporter works or what the invading aliens are doing here. My novel
Passage
was about near-death experiences, and the
Titanic
, and I needed to provide a bit of info about both (and the connection between them) to properly explain the story.

But only a bit. A paragraph, tops. This is not the time to get into the details of fourteenth-century weaving or the history of serial killers. And no diagrams, equations, or timelines.

4. If your novel simply can’t be summarized, and you find yourself writing things about the plot like, “it’s not so much a story as a mood piece,” and “it’s a sensitive portrayal of the world, with all its formlessness and lack of meaning,” you probably don’t have a plot. Your editor will figure this out. Novels, even Nobel-prize-winning ones, have plots. (See Jane Austen. And Shakespeare.) And no work of literature was ever ruined by the addition of a plot.

5. Spend at least as much time and tender loving care on your synopsis as you did on every chapter of your book. And while you’re at it, spend as much time rewriting as you did writing the book the first time, more time on the first and last chapters than on the rest of the book, much more time on the writing than the marketing, and far more time on everything than is economically practical. Writing is not a 9-to-5 job.

6. If you’re writing a synopsis for a book that’s not written yet (probably not your first novel), don’t worry that you’ll have to follow the synopsis exactly. The only time a synopsis matches the book is when it’s already written. (As you can see, my synopsis for
To Say Nothing of the Dog
doesn’t match the finished novel. Characters change names, events change, etc.) Editors expect changes along the way. Just keep them informed as you go. On the other hand, don’t sell a romantic comedy and then write a nihilistic tragedy.

7. Don’t tell the editor how brilliant your book is. She will decide that for herself. And do not, as at least one novel-submitter (according to my editor) did, say things like, “This book is certain to win the Nobel Prize,” or “any editor who’d turn this down is a moron.” (You’ll notice I didn’t title this piece “Seven Super-Duper Tips for …”)

Finally, talk is cheap. And the proof is in the pudding. That’s why editors usually ask to see three chapters and a synopsis, and many will end up wanting to see the entire manuscript (especially with a first novel) before making a decision.

I hope these tips help. Good luck with your novel!

—Connie Willis

To Say Nothing of the Dog
By Connie Willis

“But man’s greatest strength lies in his capacity for irrelevance. In the midst of pestilences, wars, and famines, he builds cathedrals.…”

—Aldous Huxley
Antic Hay

England in the summer of l889 is possibly the most restful time in history—lazy afternoons boating on the Thames, tea parties, croquet on the lawn—and Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He’s been shuttling between past and present, battling suspicious air raid wardens and blackouts to sift through the still-smoldering ruins of Coventry Cathedral and trying to cope with the unsettling symptoms of time lag, a syndrome caused by too many trips through the net into the past and too many close calls within a narrow temporal space.

The cause of all this debilitating time travel? An American, naturally. A rich American. Maggie T. Burnside, who was incensed by the destruction of Coventry Cathedral the Second during the pinpoint raids of 2007 and is determined to rebuild the original fourteenth-century church just as it was.

Poor Ned is not Maggie’s only victim—she has put all of Jesus College and most of Oxford to work, with the bribe of a staggeringly large endowment the University needs to finance its new time travel research project, a project that will hopefully unlock the riddle of the space-time continuum and revolutionize time travel.

But the endowment won’t be paid until the cathedral is “completed to Ms. Burnside’s satisfaction.” (“A term that’s an oxymoron,” the exhausted Ned mutters.) Not only does Maggie want the cathedral and its famous spire rebuilt exactly to plan, she wants every detail duplicated exactly, from monuments to hymnals to a missing Victorian atrocity known as “the bishop’s birdstump” that Ned has spent the last six weeks, his health, and all his patience chasing down.
And
she wants it all completed by November 14, 2065, the l25th anniversary of the cathedral’s destruction in a Nazi air raid.

So the research project has been put on hold, the researchers are out matching fabric samples for the pew cushions, and every don, historian, and undergraduate is busy installing organ pipes, embroidering altar cloths, and generally risking life, limb, and time lag to meet the deadline.

Including Felicity Robsart, who’s in l889, researching renovations done to the cathedral (then St. Michael’s Church) in the l880’s and dealing with table-rapping spiritualists, a
very
spoiled young lady named Tossie, and an unyielding butler who refuses to relinquish the keys to the library where the architectural plans are kept. Felicity, following said butler to steal said keys, instead witnesses him in the act of flinging Tossie’s cat into the Thames and impulsively wades into the water and rescues it.

Then, afraid the butler will make another attempt on the cat’s life, she takes it with her through the net to twenty-first century Oxford, where cats have been extinct for nearly fifty years, an action not only strictly forbidden, but (according to the laws of temporal physics) impossible.

Amazed and appalled by what Felicity’s done and by the possibility that bringing an object from the past into the future may have created a paradox that will destroy the space-time continuum, the head of Jesus College and the physicists (hastily recalled from their fabric-sample matching) meet to decide what should be done. Should they destroy the cat immediately to prevent additional paradoxes? Should they return it to the original time and place of the breach and drown it there? Or was Felicity’s rescuing of it planned for in the scheme of things, in which case drowning the cat would be creating, not eliminating, the paradox?

While they’re searching through the historical records for references to the cat and hotly debating the issue of whether to drown or not to drown, Felicity slips the cat into Ned’s luggage, and he takes it with him back to l889. Blissfully unaware of paradoxes (or the cat), Ned sets out on an idyllic boating trip down the Thames with talkative Terrence Dasherton and Cyril, a gentleman of great heart and few words. Under the influence of the gently flowing water, drooping willows, and Terrence’s unremitting stream of chatter, Ned begins to recover from his time lag symptoms and relax.

Too soon, for the damage has already been done, and Felicity’s impulsive action has already altered the course of history. Tossie has met Terrence while looking for her cat, and Terrence has not only fallen sentimentally in love with her, but, by running into Ned, has failed to meet the girl he was intended to have married. And returning the cat has only made things worse. Tossie’s so grateful for its safe return she flings her arms around Terrence’s neck and announces their engagement.

Felicity, appalled at what she’s done and at what the ultimate consequences of her act might be, attempts to repair the damage and restore the course of history. Dragging the reluctant (and still somewhat time-lagged) Ned with her, she sets out to break up Tossie and Terrence’s engagement, but everything they do only makes the situation worse. And their efforts are thwarted at every turn by eccentric Oxford dons, Darwinian evolution, a Springer spaniel who jumps out of trees onto unsuspecting passersby, the ghost of Lady Godiva, a saintly bulldog, and a cat who thoroughly deserves to be drowned.

In the meantime, the deadline for the dedication of the cathedral is fast approaching, Felicity finds out that the butler wasn’t trying to drown the cat after all and that it can swim perfectly well, Tossie elopes, and everything (literally) hangs on Ned’s locating the bishop’s birdstump.

But the space-time continuum’s tougher than it looks, and despite Ned and Felicity’s meddling (or possibly because of it) the cathedral is completed on schedule, the expensive time travel project is rendered unnecessary, all the couples (including Ned and Felicity) get properly paired off, a new link between evolution and time travel is discovered, and the cat gets its comeuppance.

And Ned not only finds the bishop’s birdstump, but the treasures of Coventry Cathedral, thought lost for all time the terrible night of the air raid.

The image of Victorian England is one of a placid idyll, marked by certainty, servants, and long, boring poems. In reality, it was an age much like ours—full of rapid and disorienting changes, the most devastating of which was Darwin’s theory of evolution. “I felt like a murderer,” Darwin wrote about publishing
The Origin of Species
, and he should have. His theory had destroyed the notion of special creation and, with it, man’s exalted position in the natural world. Man was descended from the apes, Darwin said, and that descent was a nasty tumble.

Like ours, as neurological discoveries and the human genome project tell us we’re nothing but mixtures of chemicals and pre-determined DNA, genetically engineered time bombs triggered to go off in spite of our best efforts, blowing our notions of emotion and free will to scientific smithereens.

The Victorians were also, like us, coping with an onslaught of technological and social changes—the Industrial Revolution, socialism, steam trains, telegrams, and suffragettes—and, as a result, they bear an uncomfortable resemblance to us. They were complacent, self-righteous, and addicted to foolish fads like table-rapping and romantic novels. They believed an assortment of improbable and impractical things about human nature, particularly as regards the relations between the sexes. They were puritanical, nostalgic for “the good old days,” and utterly humorless. Sound familiar?