Wednesday Word Tangle: How to turn conception into an autopsy.

Bagged, tagged and on the slab Image: Pixabay

Bagged, tagged and on the slab
Image: Pixabay

Have you ever performed an autopsy? I have. Well, sort of.

There were no guts. Well, not real live (or should that be, real dead – for live autopsies are much frowned upon in these days of Health and Safety) fleshy, tubey, pink and wriggly ones. I did not have to don white Croc shoes or a surgical mask and a bone saw was not needed, which was just as well as mine’s in the shop.

But dissection was required. Along with a steady hand, a sharp mind and a strong stomach. Which is a problem, because at the moment I don’t have any of those things.

But at least I could perform my autopsy sitting down, in the comfort of my own home and without the necessity of plastic sheeting, a chainsaw, black bin liners and duct tape. Actually, that’s a dismemberment, not an autopsy. I’ve really watched too many episodes of Dexter.

Not only that, but I tore apart this particular body whilst drinking copious amounts of tea, eating a body bag’s worth of Custard Creams and without having to wash my hands. Except after having used the loo, of course – I’m not an animal.

This was not an autopsy of the stays-with-you-for-years-especially-returning-on-nights-out-at-the-All-You-Can-Eat-Rib-Shack, but one of a more wordy nature.

For today’s Wednesday Word Tangle word is:

SYNOPSIS

Now, many more experienced novelists reading this will be muttering to themselves,

But, Lynn. How can you compare a synopsis to an autopsy? For surely, you wrote the synopsis before you wrote your novel, then based your writing on the carefully plotted design therein. Surely, the synopsis should more closely be compared to conception, not autopsy?

Yeah, alright, Mrs Smug-Pants. I know now I’m supposed to write the synopsis first. But you see, what you’re forgetting is when I started this story six years ago, my previous writing experience had been in my teens and involved Goth Princesses being whisked away from web-strewn castle turrets to live Happily Ever After on dry roasted peanuts and Pot Noodles. With added talking dragons.

I was blissfully ignorant of the process, so just dived in.

Therefore, to make my present novel ready for submission to agents, I’ve had to write the synopsis after the book was finished. It was a lesson in dissection, for I had to pick apart themes (never realised my novel needed a ‘theme’ before, I naively thought it just had to be a good read) and story arcs and ‘beats’.

Ever had to distil a novel of 80,000 or so words – giving a description of the main characters, key events, turning points and ending, whilst communicating a sense of tension and writing style – down to two sides of A4?

Neither had I.

But now it’s done and the end result is not as awful as I feared, just don’t ask me to write another one.

Until the next time.

Do visit Kat, the founder of W4

27 thoughts on “Wednesday Word Tangle: How to turn conception into an autopsy.”

  1. Writing a synopsis or an abstract is so difficult! I think your analogy works perfectly Lynn. I have a writer friend also struggling at the moment with hers. It’s not easy.
    Glad you got there in the end!
    Kat x

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Thanks, Kat. Rightly or wrongly after a few very dodgy nights’ sleep, feeling groggy, detached and totally spaced, I sent my submission out to Hodderscape on Wednesday. I’d done most of the work already, but a final proof felt like reading a text through water after having gas and air – so I’m not sure how useful that was 🙂 Ah, well, tis done. All I can do now is wait.

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      Reply

      2. Ah, bless you! What a lovely offer 🙂 Problem is, the more you return to something, the more you see its flaws. I’m sure it’s better than some submissions they’ll receive and worse than many others. Time will tell if it’s good enough. Hope you’re keeping well, my love? x

        Liked by 1 person

  2. Ha! Had to do film synopses for a screenwriting course, and I’d imagine it’d be a lot easier for formulaic movies than for your own literary baby! It maybe must feel more like embalming than an autopsy?

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    Reply

    1. Haha! Like that – embalming. Yes, it was hard, though you’d think it would be easier writing a synopsis for something I know so well – it wasn’t 🙂 If I’d thought, I could’ve written some practice synopses of films, to hone my skills. Didn’t think of that, darn it.

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  3. I was drinking coffee, and looking sideways out of my vari-focals, while I read your response to the comment from Calmgrove, and I misread “hone my skills.” I thought it said “bone my skulls”!

    You must be relieved to have ticked that job off your to-do list. I sincerely wish you every success in this stage of the venture – and all of the stages that will hopefully follow xx

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. ‘Bone my Skulls’? That’s hilarious, though conjurs some revolting images of the necrofilic persuasion. Ergh! Thanks so much Jane for your kind wishes. Yes, all done, though my brain was pretty hopeless when I finally pressed ‘send’ – I could possibly have sent a blog draft or even a shopping list by mistake. 🙂
      We’ll see. I can comfort myself with the idea that they’re unlikely to pick more than a couple of possibles from the potentially hundreds of submissions. Rejection won’t necessarily mean I’m unpublishable – just not as publishable as the chosen few 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Not as publishable IN THEIR OPINION. Agents and publishers make mistakes and miss gems.
        You must be feeling nervous and unsettled at the moment. How long do you expect to wait before you hear from them?

        Liked by 1 person

      2. You’re right, publishers and agents don’t always make the right decisions – think of all those big publishers who missed out on JK Rowling. I wonder if any of them admit to it, or if it’s a misjudgement they’d rather keep to themselves.
        Hodderscape say they’ll let people know by the end of September, though these guidelines tend to change, I find. I submitted to a BBC competition once and they notified people around six months after the original estimate. Thanks for your good wishes. We’ll see what happens.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. I have a good feeling about this. I think that even if Hodder don’t accept your book, you will get it published. Maybe I’m just an optimist! I’m putting those positive thought-waves out there for the Goddess who watches out for collective consciousness to pick up on.
        Don’t knock it – I saw a miracle a couple of years ago, and I think it may have been brought about by people zoning in on it.

        Liked by 1 person

      4. Jane, you are absolutely the best person to know. Thank you so much for your positivity. I think it’ll be published too, one day. But possibly self published!
        I went to Lourdes with school when I was eleven and found the whole commercialisation of the place – the bottles of holy water shaped like the Virgin Mary, just the high levels of tat – made me cynical about miracles. So you having seen one yourself is intriguing.
        I would never, ever underestimate the power of positive thinking, though – it has a terrifically strong affect on mind and body. It’s healing in so very many ways and without it, a person can ve totally lost.

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      5. I hope you don’t have to go down the self-publishing route. Being accepted by a publisher would give you more confidence, and it wouldn’t be your job to publicise it.
        I think it’s our collective consciousness that brings about miracles. Actually I don’t believe in miracles; I think the collective consciousness is an undiscovered scientific fact. If enough people believe in something it can happen as a direct result of that belief.
        And if that sounds naive, look at bees and ants – they’re beyond our understanding, as a bee’s nest is an organism. Each bee is just a section of that organism. What if the human race were an organism that’s gone wrong?
        Have I talked about this before? If So, I apologise for repeating myself, but it’s fascinating…

        Liked by 1 person

      6. You’ve not said it that I’ve read. And when you put it that way, it is an intriguing idea. The hive mind certainly works for insects. And it’s true that we’ve distanced ourselves from nature, so we’re unaware of natural cycles and movements, detached from it all. Perhaps we were once more aware of magnetic fields, oncoming storms, shifts in the atmosphere. It’s a fascinating thought, Jane

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      7. I’m relieved that you see it that way. So many people mistake me for a flaky new ager, but I don’t believe in magic, only science. I think science took the wrong direction, when it placed humans above other animals and chose to wave away instinct and intuition, instead of studying it. I think it is arrogant to dismiss events that seem miraculous as coincidence. We know very little about life.
        This year my brother (an atheist) got his first hive of bees. He told me that the hive is a single organism. Surely, armed with this amazing knowledge he should realise that all sorts of things which he formerly thought were impossible may be possible? The human race, or this planet, or the universe may be a single, dysfunctioning organism. I’m told the human race is hard-wired for religion. This is apparently a fact (although I haven’t looked into it yet) and atheists use it to dismiss the idea of God. Surely if we have that hard-wiring there is a reason for it, and that reason could be that we are a single organism. The brain of that organism could be named the Godhead.
        I really need to talk to him about his angry atheism. He inherited it from our dad, and I think it’s time we confronted the damage dad did to all of his children, and in so many ways.

        Liked by 1 person

      8. Do you think his views are damaging him in any way? I’m a bit of a raving atheist myself, though I find your idea about the hive mind interesting and who knows what we might discover in the future. I do think the human mind is hardwired to believe in deities and that fact has done us all a great deal of harm and is still doing so. It’s extremism that’s so frightening, people denying proven facts, shunning empathy, thinking of other people as less importatn than them just because they don’t share a certain doctrine. All of that seriously messes with the world

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      9. And, ofcourse, governments using religion for political ends.
        Two of my brothers are firm atheists, and incapable of a fun discussion on religion. Their attitudes are more arrogant than that of most christians I have met. One of them takes every excuse to bring it into the conversation, and is far more offensive than the irritating christians we meet in the street, who are, after all, trying – perhaps misguidedly – to save our souls.
        Bear in mind that when he’s not slamming all religion, he’s saying that NOBODY has the RIGHT to be politically ignorant, whether they are being ground underfoot by abuse, or suffering from paranoid scizophrenia, or even if they have such a low IQ that they can’t begin to understand what’s going on. When I say perhaps they are unable to grasp situations, he says that they should still vote, and that they should find out from someone who knows about it (in the Green Party, hopefully) who to vote for!
        Maybe you can now see why I have more of a problem with rabid atheists than intrusive christians. Some of them are extremists who go out of their way to insult and offend.

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      10. Sounds like he needs to relax – about everything in life, ever! Must be hard work having a conversation with him. Mind you, it sounds stressful being him too – being so angry all the time can’t be good for the soul 🙂
        I try not to be close minded about things, but I would call myself an atheist. I’d quite like to believe in ghosts- am a little bewitched by the thoughts of past times when people saw supernatural works in everything – times of high magic. The closest I can come is being in the middle of woodland, or in close contact with nature – that’s magic.
        Keep feeling I want to go somewhere remote, not just pretty countryside, all neat and managed, but wild. Too much Bristol living, I suspect 🙂

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      11. He’s more arrogant than angry, mush as I love him…
        I can’t imagine living in a city, theis town is bad enough, and I have a lovely view of the hills.
        You’re not far from Wales. there are a few empty spaces there – unless you’re thinking of the Gobi Desert! I remember going over it in a plane, and it was so cloudless I could see it clearly. It was wonderful. Probably not much fun to visit though!

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      12. Yes, beautiful from afar, rather than close up 🙂 We stood at the edge of the Sahara when we visited Egypt and there was a desolation there that I’ve never felt before.
        Somwhere greener, I think. And Wales definitely fits that bill. Visiting the Eden Project next week and though that’s probably one of the most cultivated spots in the country, at least it’ll be lush and green 🙂

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