Tess Canfield, Writer

February 2021: Synopsis, Structure and Repression, oh my! 

At the age of thirty-four, I’m finally starting to see the depths of one of my core defense mechanisms. While I’m all about personal growth, I have to admit, I never thought it would come from... writing a story synopsis.  

Almost every novelist hates writing a synopsis for good reason: writers like words and a synopsis is the most basic story summary you can get. Ideally 1-2 pages long, or 500-800 words. In its current state, my novel is almost exactly 80,000 words; ergo, I needed to summarize my book down to 1%. No mystery as to why I’d been putting it off.

But with my manuscript in the hands of my teacher, and the fact that I want to query some literary agents in the near-ish future, I needed to make one. Not every agent asks for a synopsis, but it’s a good tool to have.

Hoo boy. I knew I was going to hate it, but I did not expect a synopsis would spin me out so completely. 

I looked at the chapters and outline of my book. As I started to write the summary, dread raked through my body. I filled one page and I’d just barely gotten through the first ten chapters. Another page in, I was only halfway through the story. And then it dawned on me: I had no fucking clue what my story structure was. 

Vocabulary lesson: Plot is the series of events that make up a story. Structure is the overall design or layout of a story. Most stories follow the structure of other stories, almost like a formula. It’s rarely something one makes up. This is foundational stuff to storytelling. You’ve got your characters, your setting, the plot and then the structure—the basket that carries it all.

Since the synopsis is such a bare bones summary of the book, you follow the structure to tell the story as succinctly as possible. But... I didn’t know what it was.

The dread deepened and I was swan diving into it. I suddenly had an extra hole in my head—a big one where everything was simultaneously leaking out and flooding in.

After clawing through three single-spaced pages, I went straight to bed. (It was three o’clock in the afternoon.) I couldn’t do anything. I stared at Instagram for about twenty minutes. Then I slid my phone under a pillow and laid there, brain bobbing in the abyss like jetsam. My husband came out of the office around six and asked me what was wrong.

Two years and all I had was a mess. That’s what was wrong. 

The thing is, I knew this was a problem. I knew it from early stages in the drafting process. Back in 2019, I even asked my teacher to give a whole lecture on story structure, which she did, and it still wasn’t clicking for me. It has always felt like my story was there to discover, not define. How could one be that intentional? My outline didn’t fit into any of the structures I was aware of. So what did I do?

Hello repression, my old friend. 

I repress my feelings, this is not news to me. I just always thought I could tell when I was doing it. I thought I was more careful, more strategic. Like I could notice when I felt something icky and decide when and how I was going to address it.

Now I’m starting to see the depth of this pattern. I’m an Enneagram 1, living under the relentless gaze of the Inner Critic, but I’m also a Cancer, burying my squishy feeling stuff under my crab shell. When you combine those two profiles, you get someone who hides their own feelings even from themselves. You can’t judge what you can’t see, right?

I had no idea how monolithically scared I was that I couldn’t wrap my head around story structure. When it didn’t click for me back in 2019 during my early drafts, I didn’t keep calm, ask more questions, research, or try to educate myself so I could identify and define it. I just shoved it all in a deep noggin basement, locked it up, and hid the key. I avoided the issue entirely until the synopsis—the jaguar in the fucking night. 

The next morning, I showed up to my writing session in shambles. Said something like, “Guys, remember all that confidence I was feeling? I lost it.” I told my writing partners about my issues with the synopsis, structure and me lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon. I hoped for some commiseration, which I did receive, but because I have The Best Goddamn Writing Partners in the World™®, I also got solutions. 

Immediately my friend Julie was like, “I have notes from a webinar I took on structure; I’ll send them to you!” To make a long story short, if it weren’t for Julie, I’d probably be mummified in the fetal position by now. 

One of the most common story structures is The Hero’s Journey. Popularized by Joseph Campbell, this structure has been used time and time again from Greek myths to Star Wars: hero goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home transformed. It doesn’t fit my narrative structure at all. And I knew that. What I didn’t know was that this structure has been adapted. One simple line in Julie’s email read: I'd look up Maureen Murdock who has outlined a "feminine story structure." 

Now, I could write a whole ‘nother post about why there was a need to define a story structure by gender, but Maureen Murdock noticed that this so-called Hero’s Journey never seems to fully encompass the trials and emotional growth experienced by people suffering under the patriarchy (usually women). I looked at some feminine story structure examples and... holy shit. 

There it was.

I cleaned up my synopsis and after I had something more succinct, I was able to take the nine stages outlined in this example and map it almost exactly to my story. It did have a structure after all! It just didn’t match anything in the Western and masculine traditions I’d heard about. In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense since, ya know, I don’t usually care for traditions defined as Western and masculine…

Whew. Relief doesn’t even begin to cut it.

I do wish I’d gained something more practical to offer when it comes to structure. I’m sure seasoned writers who don’t have clinical defense mechanism issues have something more helpful to say than, “ignore your structure, two years later have a major freakout, and hope to God you’ll find one.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But my favorite part of the feminine hero story is this. Stage #6 is The Death. Some characters do die here as they realize they cannot become their fullest self in the patriarchal world (Anna Karenina, The Awakening, etc) but those that experience the symbolic death get to move onto the next stage: #7. Support. “Someone or something supports them (or had better, or they may not make it out alive).”

On my own journey with this book, my writing partners were there for me in that seventh stage. I got out of my mental crisis alive. So while I don’t have anything wise to say about story structure, I can offer my reminder to something far more universal: don’t ignore your fears and ask for help. In whatever you’re doing, whether it’s writing a book, painting a mural, creating a presentation or raising some kids, that lesson feels applicable to anyone.

Most of us don’t fall into the trope of the epic hero. But there are still paths forward. Some of them require support, and if you ask me, that’s still a pretty good story.

- Tess Canfield, February 2021 via The Latest