HOW many pages????

I've worked in film and TV most of my career, so I'd be lying if I said turning Populazzi into a film or TV project at some point isn't on my radar.  It is.  It's not why I wrote the book — I wrote it because I loved the story and felt a novel was the best way to tell it.  But now that it's written, I'm peeking into other venues as well.

To that end, an intrigued party the other day asked me for a synopsis of the book.  I sent them to this page.

It didn't work for them.

They needed something with more detail… but not too much detail.  Three to five pages.  And ideally, it should highlight the more cinematic moments of the book.  If I did it correctly, I had a shot at turning the "intrigued party" into an "interested party."  If I did it wrong, no dice.

No pressure or anything.

The intrigued party had found me through a friend, and that friend had assured them I could throw together this new synopsis in no time.  I thought so too…

…then I started.

Five pages and ten hours later, I was only two thirds of the way through the story.  I could feel it wasn't right, and I was ripping out my hair trying to figure out why.  I felt like I was doing what was asked — highlighting the basics, then diving whole hog into my favorite moments — but even as I was writing, I knew it was reading less like a tantalizing overview, and more like a Reader's Digest condensed version of the book.

I needed help.  I sent up a flare to my friend — the intermediary between myself and the intrigued party.  She had read Populazzi and loved it, which is why she contacted Intrigued Party to begin with.  She's brilliantly savvy and has spent many years in the film world.  She read my "summary," and came back with:  "Here's what you want — you set up A, meet B, do C-D-E, touch on F, and finish with the big G.  Done."

She made it sound so easy!

And she was right!  The minute she gave me that road map, it was a breeze for me to write up a quick, compelling summary that told just enough… but not too much.  It was interesting… I've been so involved in the millions of details of this book (and the acres of backstory that didn't even make it into the novel), it was torture for me to pull back and see only the most major moments, sifting out everything that wasn't necessary to grab someone's attention.

Now that I've done it, I feel like I have a better sense of how to explain the book simply, without getting bogged down in all the details.  I adore those details and they're what makes the book great, but it's just as important to have a bird's-eye view of the story that works really really well.

Writers, do you have this issue too?  Do you find it difficult to sum up the novel you've lived and breathed in three pages of terse brilliance?  Or do you thrive on finding those E-ticket-ride moments and highlighting them in a way that sums up everything in a three-minute elevator pitch?