my downfall, the synopsis

Writing stories? No problem.
Finishing a novel? Barely broke a sweat.
Writing a synopsis? ...I'm absolutely terrified.

According to the author and agent blogs that I stalk, a synopsis is critical when you're trying to get your story published. You need to be able to sum up all of the plot and mention each important occurence in the novel, so that the agent and editor can see that you can do plot, and handle character progression, and all that jazz.

I don't think I can do it.

Any time I've been asked to sum up Thistleswitch, I come up empty. "What's your story about?" leaves me speechless, because it's not really "about" anything. It's about the characters, and it's about the setting. It's not really about a plot, because the only weak plot it has is "A hero goes on a quest to marry the most beautiful princess in the world, and encounters obstacles and hilarious shenanigans along the way." Would I pick up that book? Maybe if the cover was snazzy. But a synopsis in a letter to an agent doesn't come with a cover, snazzy or otherwise.

Not only that, but you apparently need to have synopses of different lengths. Your "short" synopsis is one to three pages long. Your "long" synopsis is somewhere in the six to ten range. And every published author or agent who talks about this seems to think that writing a synopsis that only takes up three pages is hard, because there's so much to go into it. Now, I think I'll have a problem with a three-page synposis, but it's because I don't know if I can fill it up.

Granted, I haven't attempted it yet. Maybe when I actually try to write this synopsis, I'll face the former problem rather than the latter. But I don't particularly want to write one, because I've been completed freaked out by all of the blog posts I've read about how vital a good synopsis is and how completely screwed you are if your synopsis stinks.

I thought that writing a 70,000 word novel was the hard part. Why is one page so horrifying?