Query Letters, The Synopsis, and Formatting

I'm pretty set on a query letter now. It took a ton of drafts to condense a novel into 180 words. It's not the entire novel, more of a teaser to spark interest from an agent, but still - there's a ton to put in there. I've been through maybe ten or fifteen drafts. None of the pages of notes I made a few months ago made it into the letter, but they were helpful for the synopsis.

The synopsis is more indepth than the query letter - it can't be so much of a tease. The synopsis needs to have the main characters, the major plot points, and the resolution of the story. Fortunately I have more than a few hundred words. Every website and how-to book has a different answer regarding the correct length. Agents (at least those I'm looking at), however, seem to want 1-2 pages. I started my synopsis with the novel outline with select quotes pasted in. That sucker was like forty pages long. I cut it down to twenty pages, then to ten. Then eight, four, finnally two.

I thought if someone wanted a synopsis of a particular length I could choose one of those pared down versions. Good idea, bad result. The twenty pager read decently, but that's because it had most of the good lines and short scene descritions from the novel. By the time I was down to two pages it read like a boring high school book report. Start over.

I started a new synopsis and referred to my old query letter notes. I shot for two pages, wound up with three. Cut, edit, rewrite, edit, cut. A few days later and I have a decent copy. A few more tweaks and I'll feel good about sending it out. I can really start hounding agents now.

I'm an architect and designer by profession, so I know about good presentation - just not about manuscript presentation. I've read enough advice blogs and How I Write books to know I need to stick to a narrow set of presentation parameters. Use a certain font, with certain margins. The header should say this. On and on. Except no one seems to agree what is best. One website said courier with 1.5 inch margins was THE way to format my manuscript. Ok. My 180 page manuscript suddenly became 650 pages. Uh oh.

I turned back to the internet. Another site said courier was NOT the way to go. I should use Times New Roman and definitely not Arial (my preferred font). I did as bid, cut the margins down to one inch and brought the manuscript down to 400 or so pages. I had to put a centered pound symbol ( # ) between every scene break in the book (that took a while). Then I ran the last spell check on those words the dictionary AND the computer said didn't exist (they were right 80% of the time). Bam, ready to go. Time to keep our fingers crossed.