So, you've now trawled through your entire, sprawing manuscript, carefully refraining from line edits and rewrites as you went, and pieced together your super-synopsis of what's actually going on in those pages, and when. Those outline-first authors out there: does it match your plan? Is that chapter really as compelling / important / moving as it was in the plan? Did you spend an unexpected amount of time talking about something else entirely?

If the answer's "no", then you either took shortcuts with your synopsis-making or were so unbelievably disciplined with outline-following in your writing that I fear you may've ironed out the creative spark of that novel completely. But I digress.

As I said last time, novels are too big to think about all at once. You can look at the general story or the minutae of a scene, but you can't hold all of them in your head at the same time and think about how they're working together. So, step one - we condensed the novel into who, what, where, why, how, and added some notes and ratings on theme, action, character arcs, etc. But that synopsis is likely stretching at least a page per chapter - useful, for later, but still too big for the moment. For the moment, we'll ignore all that 'meta-story' stuff we talked about last week and focus on the regular synopsis. We're going to condense the entire storyline of the novel down to a single sentence - what's called a 'logline', in film terms. We do this for three reasons:

• the act of progressively condensing and simplifying the plot makes it much easier to see the structure and pinpoint problems
• the logline is a great litmus test to use when editing, and to guide you in reshaping the novel
• the logline, when polished up, makes a great starting point to build your query from.

But we can't take a thirty-page synopsis and turn it into a sentence in one go. (Well we can, but it's not going to be a sentence that helps us very much.) We need to do it in stages - that way, areas of the plot that take more or less time than they should become apparent, as do storylines that are more or less important than we intended. You may end up with a book with two main plots, needing two separate loglines. Don't worry, we can deal with that - but we need to make sure we're working from what we've written, not from what we think the book should be.

Step two - condensing the treatment

I'm going to assume you were reasonably thorough in your treatment (that's the thirty-ish page document of synopsis.) and that you have about a page of description per chapter. If you don't, unless your chapters are blindingly short, you need to go back and do it again. I'm not kidding - less than a page is not enough to get in the requisite details that you'll need later when we're analysing and editing.

Right - we have a page. We're going to turn each page into a paragraph. Just take the most important information - and I'm afraid I can't tell you what's most important, here, other than if it's not crucial to the plot (or character-development), it's not important. Remember to include developments of all storylines that occur in each chapter, even if they're half a sentence.

Now you should have six pages, or thirty-ish (however many chapters you have, I'm just going to assume thirty) paragraphs of super-condensed-novel-happenings. Don't worry, I'm not about to ask you to turn that into single-sentences. Well, not directly.

Forming the acts

Your chapters should form a larger structure - what we'd commonly refer to as an Act structure. It doesn't matter how many Acts you have - really, it makes absolutely no difference - although this process is difficult with anything less than three or more than seven. Take a look at your thirty paragraphs, and see where the drama falls. Anywhere where there's a big rise in tension or drama - the hero tries and fails (or succeeds), the mentor snuffs it, all hope is lost - marks the end of an Act. Group your chapter-paragraphs into their Acts.

Here we can start to see if there are pacing problems or significant plot problems. If you can't find any acts, your story has no dramatic tension, no stakes, and no way to interest a reader. It needs a drama-transfusion, pronto - you need to stick your characters up a tree with a bear and some bees and maybe a shark and throw rocks at them. If you have two many acts - say, an act every few chapters - then you need to either reconsider what constitutes an 'act' (take a look at the 'tension' ratings you gave the chapters), or you need to reshuffle the structure to give more buildup between payoff. See if some things can happen at the same time (for the reader) or if some of those act-climaxes can be played down, or dropped altogether.

The important thing is - don't start rewriting now. We're not finished, and we're going to find so many other problems that need fixing. It'd be a pain to spend all that effort fixing something that actually needs to be cut, or no longer needs fixing once you've changed something else. So leave it alone. Just make a note somewhere of what you found with the act-divisions.

If you've had problematic act division (like no acts or too many) divide the story into where you think the acts should fall. Decide on how many you want (three or five is a common favourite, but as I've said, it really doesn't matter for this) and divy up the chapters appropriately.

Creating the synopsis

Now reduce each act to a paragraph. If you have eleven acts, they'd better be very short paragraphs. Your synopsis should fit on a page, give or take - and this is a 'real' synopsis, the kind you'd give your agent or editor. (Don't go fiddling with margins to make it fit here, I'm being approximate. five or six lines over doesn't matter. Two pages over does.)

Take care as you do so not to eliminate plot lines - don't turn your book into something that's only about the main character if there are other important storylines. It'll be important in a minute how much 'space' you've spent per storyline, so think carefully about how you condense things.

Your whole novel now fits on a page - now that is enough to keep in your head and analyse. But we're not done yet:

Designing the logline

There are two 'schools of thought' for the next step, and I find it depends very much on the story as to which process I use.

One method is for books with relatively 'simple' plots - young-adult, thriller, horror and the like, and it's just a continuation of what we've been doing - take something that's a page long, and turn it into a paragraph. In this case, take your page-long synopsis, and make it a paragraph. Not a terribly long one, either - you'll have to be brutal.  Look at what's most important to each act, what you've spent most of each act's paragraph talking about, and work from there.

For more complex works - epic fantasy or literature - I create Act-loglines. I distil each act into an abstract sentence that encapsualtes what's going on - the aim, the climax, the denoument of each act.

From either step, we then create the final logline. A single sentence that encapsulates the story, that forms its core.

Remember, it's about the events of the story - the action. No adjectives or adverbs allowed. (Actually, I should have banned them from the start - they've no place here). Names and specifics don't help, either. "Luke learns about the Force to destroy the Death Star and save Leia and the Rebellion" isn't a fraction as informative as "a farmboy learns to control his own power to protect a princess and her rebel alliance from a murdurous empire". One gives us the facts of the story the second gives us its soul.

Yes, technically 'rebel' and 'murderous' shouldn't be there, but they're necessary to show the moral compass of the story. I probably should have taken the time to come up with something adjective-free. But hopefully it gets the point across - this is no longer about your specific story, it's about the 'shape' of the story. It's what you'd say to someone if you had ten seconds to tell them about your book. It speaks universally, doesn't need extra explanation about who Luke or Leia are, or what a Death Star does, and shows us clearly what innate 'myths' (hello, Joseph Campbell) the story's plugging into.

Sub-plots do not belong in loglines, although they should 'support' the story (I'll get to that later). If you have a clearly ' main' story and several 'minor' ones, you can pretend the minor ones don't exist for the moment. If, however, you have two (or more) equally-important stories, your logline will be a little different - you need something that encapsulates all of the stories. (No, creating four loglines for one novel is just not on. You get one logline, so it better fit everything.) Go big, sweeping and general: if you're covering more than one story, you really don't have room for specifics. "Six couples combat the trials of love and experience across one christmas" (Love Actually. Not their real logline, just something I made up then. Their real one is probably much better.) Look for things in common between the storylines - themes, even.

If you absolutely, positively can't find a logline to fit all the major storylines, then the ones that don't fit need to be either minor, or perhaps in another book altogether. But don't do that now. We're not finished yet. Just make a note.

Now we have a treatment, an act structure, a synopsis and a logline. You'll be happy to know that's all the groundwork done - now, we're going to take a hard look it all.

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