Thursday Thoughts

My main writing project over the past short while has been the dreaded synopsis, or rather, in plural - I have a long version and a short version, which was intended to be five paragraphs, but is currently sitting defiantly at six.  The way the action breaks up, however, it seems better suited in its current form ... and it should be a one-page synopsis when formatted in normal-person font etc - which is to say, not in the 8-9 pt font in which I habitually write.  (I don't like how little of the screen the text fills on Word at 100%, so I write at 150% ... but that would make the text huge, so I use smaller font.  Previous editions of Word allowed you to word wrap, but then it's hard to know where you are on the page ...

(There is a method to my madness, suffice to say.)

I've been pleasantly surprised by how easy this synopsis was to write in a compact format, though I'm sure I still have extraneous details.  For my longest novel in a while, I was dreading it ... but I found that it was fairly easy to move through the action points, and that I didn't need to go back and fill in as much as I usually do when I reached the latter parts of the synopsis.  (That's usually my problem:  I'll think, "Oh, I can omit ABC" and then when I get about two-thirds of the way through, I realize that S and T depend more than tangentially on B, which ... etc.)  It may be because the whole book was written with a circular arc, returning to its starting point geographically and perhaps thematically.

Now as I'm tidying up what I have, I'm wondering - does anyone have any tips for tightening a synopsis?