Wednesday links: Crafting a synopsis and writing people of colour

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few.

Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. An Illustrated Guide to Writing People of Color (if you happen to be a person of another color), from BuzzFeed: I’ve been trying to incorporate more minorities in my own writing, and I have to admit that I sometimes find myself unsure of how to do it. I don’t want to accidentally cross any lines, particularly ones that I don’t necessarily know about. This article gives some good advice on how to handle that. Excerpt: “When we discussed this later, she (a white writer) admitted she feels uncomfortable adding people of color (PoC) to her fiction, as it feels disingenuous. ‘Write what you know’ and all that. How could she add, say, a Japanese person without it seeming like a token gesture?”

2. Creating the Dreaded Synopsis, from QueryTracker Blog: Writing a synopsis is often said to be one of the most difficult parts of writing a novel. You have all of these wonderful things–an interesting plot, realistic characters, a clear setting–how can you possibly boil all of that down to one to five pages? Excerpt: “When I first began preparing my manuscript submission, I drafted a 2-page synopsis using the ‘just describe your novel as briefly as possible’ method. To admit that my original synopsis failed to rock would be an understatement.”