Amber Argyle can write

I've been meaning to point out a great post by Amber Argyle for a while. She goes over a few of her least favorite things that amateur writers do.


Amber Argyle also recently posted on synopses/summaries.

In essence, you are boiling down 80K words to a .5-1k summary, which means you have to focus on a single character and the major plot, and only include any subplots that are needed to make the story make sense. Another great tip, I believe from the reply posts, is to leave out names in the synopsis-- label people by their relationship to the protagonist or their profession.