Writers often make the mistake of thinking a synopsis is in some way related to the blurb that will grace the back cover of their book if it has the good fortune to be published. It is most certainly not this. Back cover blurb is designed to give potential readers an idea of what is inside the book without giving too much away. It is written in such a way as to tease the potential reader into buying the book in order to discover what happens to the main character or characters that are placed in the situation alluded to.

Publishers and agents do not want to be teased in this way (or any way, for that matter). Finishing a back cover blurb-style synopsis with a ‘Will Peter save the day and win the heart of his true love?’ will not impress a publisher or agent. They do not want to have to ask you for the whole manuscript to find out. They will just bin the sample chapters you included in your package to them and move on to the next submission. You may well have penned the next War and Peace, but the publisher or agent will never know it; they just don’t have the time to second guess you.

Another mistake writers often make is in using their synopsis to extol the virtues of their magnum opus. The synopsis is not the place to mention that ‘This novel is a story of love, loss and redemption’ or that this story is ‘a hilariously witty examination of the human condition’. It is not the place to mention that this novel is ‘comparable to Nabokov at his best’. In fact, nowhere is the place to say any of this. The publisher or agent is the person who will decide how good, bad or indifferent your novel is, how funny or profound, and whether or not your work carries resonances of the work of the giants of literature. That is if they get past your cover letter, the synopsis, and the sample chapters you send, and ask to see the full manuscript.

So, what do you include in your synopsis? It’s actually simplicity itself. As Joe Friday is purported to have said time and again (but never actually did) in the 1950s TV show, Dragnet: ‘Just the facts, ma’am.’ A synopsis should include everything that actually happens in the story. Just the plot. There is no need to include every thought the main character has or every single minor occurrence in the story. Just the main events. It may be important to mention the main character’s state of mind occasionally, but keep it short. In fact, keep the whole thing short. And this is the art of writing a good synopsis: what to put in and what to leave out, how to get the essentials of the story across in as brief a way as possible.

Below is a sample of what I’m talking about, the wording of the synopsis for the first five chapters of my novel Down and Out:

Chapter 1: Joey and his fellow vagrants sit in St. Stephen’s Green licking their wounds after a failed attempt to make off with several bottles of alcohol from an off licence. A gang of thugs arrives in the park, intent on wreaking havoc. Joey and the others decide to beat a hasty retreat. Unfortunately, before they can get out of the park, they witness the gang of thugs surrounding another vagrant and kicking him to death. Joey’s group are spotted and for a frozen moment, both gangs stand regarding each other. Joey realises he knows one of the gang; the recognition is mutual. The vagrants, impelled by a shock of adrenaline, manage to get out of the park and away from the thugs. That night, Joey ponders the enormity of what has happened and tries to come to terms with the fact that one of the gang of thugs is his son Darren.

Chapter 2: Back in the squat he shares with his gang, Darren realises what he has done and is disgusted with himself. He is also ashamed of his dad. As the others shoot up and crash out, Darren wrestles with several conflicting emotions before seeking the oblivion of heroin.

Chapter 3: The following morning, Joey’s daughter Chloe flees her abusive boyfriend, Robbie, with her daughter Jade. Heavily pregnant, she abandons the apartment they have lived in for two years and ends up in Dublin’s city centre with Jade and all their belongings, not knowing where to start looking for a roof over their heads.

Chapter 4: In a typical day on the streets, Joey struggles with the question of what he should do about Darren. We learn a little of how Joey feels about his wife Caroline.

Chapter 5: Darren’s gang causes disruption in a convenience store, hurling racial abuse at a member of staff. They subsequently mug a man a few streets away and visit their drug dealer with the proceeds of their robbery. Back in the squat, as they prepare to shoot up, Darren finds himself thinking again about his dad and dwelling on the event that shattered his family.

You will note that the above is written in the third person present tense throughout, which is standard for synopses regardless of the person and tense used for the actual novel itself. It states exactly what happens, chapter by chapter. This includes the ending. Publishers and agents need to know how the story ends. It will inform their decision to read the sample chapters or not.

I should say at this point that there is a trend, particularly in the US, of including a very short one page pitch document with your cover letter, which publishers or agents will read before they decide whether or not to read the synopsis. This document includes the title of the work and author details, word count of the full manuscript, a one-line description of the story in as few words as possible, and the book’s unique selling points (USPs).

For examples of one-line descriptions or pitches, I’ll turn to Hollywood. I don’t have any details, but I’m guessing the one-line pitch for Cowboys & Aliens was: ‘Cowboys and Aliens’. This says it all and would have had producers queuing up to throw money at the project. Another example is the SF movie In Time. The story is based on a really simple but effective premise that people in the future are given one year of life left to them when they hit 25 years of age. They are paid for their work in time and have to use portions of this time to buy a cup of coffee or groceries or whatever they need. I’m guessing the one-line pitch for this movie was: ‘They say ‘time is money’. But what is money was time?’ Potential producers would have been intrigued enough to at least go on to read the synopsis.

Including a list of unique selling points in your pitch is designed to indicate to the publisher or agent how a publisher’s sales and marketing departments might push the book. Yes, I know; why should you be doing their job for them? Unfortunately, this is the way things are going (ditto for promotion of your book and yourself after it has been published). An example of a USP might be, in the case of a book about special ops behind enemy lines, the fact that the writer is an ex-SAS man, with first-hand experience of what he is writing about. In the case of a travel book, it might be a USP that the author’s father was an army officer, which necessitated the author’s moving around a lot and living in exotic locales. If you have access to a well-known celebrity, who is in some way connected to the main subject matter of your book, and is willing to endorse it publically, this is a plus. The challenge, of course, is to come up with a few USPs for your book, which, no matter how good the book is, can be quite a task.

However, for the moment, most publishers and agents still operate on the model of cover letter, synopsis, and sample chapters. It’s a case of doing a little research when drawing up a list of publishers or agents you plan to submit to, and checking out their requirements.

Of course, I have to put my hand up here and say I’m still in the process of finding a publisher for my novel, and am considering making minor adjustments to the novel (and a major adjustment to the ending) before making another foray into the madness that is the publishing industry today, but the important thing is to ensure I put my best foot forward from the get-go.

The sad and discouraging fact is that publishers and agents are swamped with submissions and have very little time to devote to each ‘case’. It’s important to sound the right note with your cover letter (see Part 3 in this occasional series). This will encourage the publisher or agent to read the synopsis. If they like what they see there, they may move on to reading the sample chapters you lovingly included in your package to them. That’s what you’re trying to get them to do. Ninety per cent of the time they won’t make it that far. You can’t assume they’ll automatically read your sample chapters just because you sent them. They are actively looking for the first opportunity to not have to read any further. Depressing, I know, but an unfortunate fact of life.

But all is not doom and gloom. It’s just a matter of getting your cover letter and synopsis right. You want to get the publisher or agent to the sample chapters themselves. If you can do this the battle is half won. After that, it’s down to the quality of the writing itself. If you’ve done a half decent job of that, the chances are the publisher or agent will ask to see the full manuscript.

‘A Certain Power’ presents an alternative history that sees Finland lending support to the Tsarists in their retaking of St. Petersburg during the Russian Civil War. In ‘The Unrest at Aachen’, a complex tug-of-war for the sympathies of the German people is enacted in the lead-up to the outbreak of the First World War. A doctor of linguistics struggles to popularise a newly invented international language in the aftermath of the Great War in ‘The Mascarons of the Late Empire’.

A theme of the passing of the old world and the dawning of the modern runs through all of the stories, which makes their placement in time all the more appropriate, as the Great War destroyed, for once and for all, old world thinking and saw the emergence of new ideologies based on the individual and self-determination. In ‘The Dawn at Tzern’, Postmaster Conrad, who manages a tiny post office in a village situated in a rural outpost of the empire, finds himself reluctant to destroy his books of stamps when the old Emperor dies and new stamps, featuring the image of a new, younger and inexperienced Emperor, are issued. In ‘The Ka of Astarakhan’, a sainted madman, or ex-soldier, or high priest, we’re never quite sure who or what the narrator is, is brought, fever-wracked, by a travelling companion to a derelict bath-house in a village en route to Astrakhan to rest, recuperate, or possibly die. There is no thought of the new world coming to life all around him; only a dream of the way things were and a determination to resuscitate that golden era.

Central to this old world is a certain understanding of an essential unknowability of the cosmos, or at least a belief in forces operating beyond our senses that can only ever be glimpsed in a rare conjoining of circumstances. In ‘The Walled Garden on the Bosphorus’, a young man visits the puzzlingly deserted apartment of a French ex-pat he has become acquainted with while living in Constantinople. The French ex-pat, Felix Vrai, has been investigating ancient religions that purport to shed light on the real nature of the universe and the young man suspects there may be some connection between that fascination and Vrai’s disappearance. The protagonist of ‘The Amber Cigarette’ is convinced that discovering a certain way of looking at a cigarette case he has recently purchased will open doors to a new way of perceiving the world. ‘The Original Light’ explores similar territory when a young boy becomes addicted to an idea put forward by his Uncle Vasta that we see only a dim reflection of the real universe.

In all of these stories, and more, there is a remarkable sense of place as well as time. There are hints of Kafka here and there and I’m reminded of the work of Ivo Andric, the Nobel Prize winning author of The Bridge on the Drina and The Damned Yard and Other Stories. But Valentine brings his own unique voice to the stories in this collection in a synthesis of influences that creates something genuinely new and different. Highly recommended.

Selected Stories by Mark Valentine (Swan River Press, hb, 184pp, €30.00)

Oscar and Lucinda

Many will have seen the movie and enjoyed it, but anyone who has read the book will find the movie disappointing. The primary reason is that the movie dispenses with the first half of the novel (some 300 pages!), which is the complex and beautifully written story of each of the main characters before they meet each other. It is this part of the book that lends the second half of the novel its tragic and compelling power. The sheer impossibility of their love for one another is painstakingly delineated as impending disaster approaches.

The language of the novel is truly Dickensian in its detail and its scope and lends the story a convincing verisimilitude. There is also much humour throughout; a particularly memorable scene relating to the entry of a lady of high moral fibre through the window of Oscar’s presbytery drawing room while he tries to hide evidence of his gambling nature is hysterically funny. We are also treated to a fascinating insight into the differing qualities of Oscar’s and Lucinda’s addiction, with an examination of the various gambling systems they develop along the way and their degrees of success and failure.

It is a book of monumental scope and breath of vision. The only thing I’d advise readers to do is persevere through the first 40 pages or so, which give a detailed account of the various Protestant splinter faiths. After that, the story takes off.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (Faber & Faber, pb, 520pp, €8.42)

Many of the stories included revolve around the same character, Ian, as he negotiates life’s variegated twists and turns, many of which he blunders into with a mixture of innocence and a self-destructive impulse.

In ‘Jimi’, a teenaged Ian skives off to a Jimi Hendrix concert and reaps the reward from a violent father on his return. A college-going Ian crosses paths with the slightly older trumpet-playing Raymond in ‘Trumpet in the Towel’ and gains a glimpse of the glamour and possibilities of a life outside Ireland as the trumpeter leaves these shores to forge his in London. ‘Such a Good Invention’ sees Ian transplanted to London, falling for artist Deborah, and grasping at a kind of happiness he can’t quite articulate and which proves illusive.

In the stories that feature Ian, what we get is a mosaic of a life that builds over the course of the collection, and not necessarily in chronological order, to form a fractured and imperfect picture of a man searching for some meaning in a world that seems, on the surface of things, to be devoid of it.

In ‘Winter Sun’, Ian and his wife, Sandra, enjoy a holiday in the sun, and we detect, through a waiter’s story of heartbreak and the neon nightmare of a nearby resort, the first hint of stormy times ahead for the couple. ‘Yesterday’s News’ sees Ian floundering in the last vestiges of a sinking relationship with Ellen, pre, post or during his marriage to Sandra, we’re never quite sure. Till, in many ways a young version of Ian, stumbles along a dark country road in ‘New Year’s Day’ (which was shortlisted for the 2011 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year award) and encounters a drink-driving, older and no wiser, Ian, who offers him a place for the remaining hours of the night. A sense of history repeating itself, of unbreakable patterns, pervades the piece.

Highlights of the collection include ‘A Different Story’, which details a truly unsavoury act of manipulation by a controlling and abusive driver on a desperate hitchhiker, ‘A Beautiful Day’, about the simple joys of a day spent fishing in a local river, ‘You’re Never Alone’, where an Irish man working in Germany is drawn against his better judgement into the empty pleasures of a brothel while his wife is away in Prague, and ‘The Way Things Happen’, an (autobiographical?) account of a writer meeting what could turn out to be the love of his life and how it could all have gone wrong.

Border Lines is topped and tailed by a story of Ian as a young boy and his favourite uncle, Roy, who leaves Ireland abruptly on the flimsiest of excuses and a story where Ian and his uncle encounter each other again more than thirty years later. This final story, ‘My Perfect Uncle’, connecting as it does with the opening piece, serves to unite the whole book as a story arc and ends the collection on a satisfyingly uplifting note. The reader suspects Ian has arrived at a point in his life where some things at least make a kind of sense to him and don’t necessarily have to be picked over and examined too closely.

Border Lines by John Walsh (Doire Press, pb, 125pp, €12.00)