Writing Synopses Help...

[Chris Tresson]

... I need some!

I know there's plenty of sample scripts out there, but are there any sample synopses? I've been writing for a while and have produced a few synopses for things that have been accepted elsewhere but I'm convinced I could be doing a better job of writing a synopsis. 

Any ideas guys? I've been looking around and haven't seen anything on comic synopses and how to do them properly.

Cheers,

Tresson.

[Montynero]

Dan Abnett knows what time it is. There's a lot redacted but you get the structure:

http://www.vertigocomics.com/blog/2012/03/27/editor-will-dennis-talks-the-new-deadwarians-the-pitch

[Chris Tresson]

Cheers for that, Monty! 

[Bat King]

I suck at synopsis right now too... I used to get it but I lost it somewhere...

[Chris Tresson]

I think my biggest problem is that I put too much information in that isn't relevant. but, when I remove that stuff, I'm not left with very much to show. Is it a matter of quality (of writing) over quantity, maybe?

[Charlie boy]

Don't know if this will be much help to you pal but when I took Film and Media Studies at college (a long time ago) we were told a synopsis for a film/book/pretty much anything a synopsis is required for should comfortably fit on one side of A4 paper (we were told this after we had all typed these sprawling epics as our first attempt for part of the exercise). After a while, we were able to get our synopses down to a couple of paragraphs; these exercises were to see if people could name the film or whatever we were describing without giving away the title etc so maybe you should just aim for one side of A4 paper.
We were also encouraged to try and put a real good line in if possible to just grab the attention of the person reading it via a comparison to something popular; for example the synopsis to Aliens is said to have included Jaws in space and Stephen Kings synopsis for 'Salem's Lot included something like Bram Stoker's Dracula meets (name of a popular daytime soap in the US at the time).

[Jim_Campbell]

We were also encouraged to try and put a real good line in if possible to just grab the attention of the person reading it via a comparison to something popular; for example the synopsis to Aliens is said to have included Jaws in space and Stephen Kings synopsis for 'Salem's Lot included something like Bram Stoker's Dracula meets (name of a popular daytime soap in the US at the time).

That would be a logline. There's a fairly neat overview of how to write one here, including the very salient advice that if you can't distill your story down to a manageable logline, you may want to reconsider re-writing the story. There's another discussion of loglines, with some famous examples here.

Alternatively, why not randomly generate your logline first and write the story afterwards? A captain of a cruise ship and five cocky wizards search for the Fountain of Youth in a whorehouse. :-)

Cheers

Jim

Edited to substitute much better logline...

[Chris Tresson]

What about short stories/Future Shocks? Same principles for those?

[Jim_Campbell]

What about short stories/Future Shocks? Same principles for those?

The last time I heard — and I haven't been keeping up — the advice was Pg1: Your contact details; story title; logline. Pg2: one-page synopsis of the whole story. Pg3-?: full script of the whole four page (?) story.

Neat piece of advice on Future Shock writing from ex-Tharg Andy Diggle: once you've come up with your story's twist ending, put it at the top of page two and see where the story goes from there.

Cheers

Jim

[Chris Tresson]

Cheers for that, Jim. I appreciate it.