Sunday, November 20, 2005

There are bad lengths for screen stories and good ones. I find I can't get a five page story without first writing a ten page beat sheet and boiling it down. A page and a half is easy. Three pages (750) words is even harder than 5 pages. I have to throw out actual story and replace it with something simpler.

When I write a synopsis, my goal is to tell a story. Not necessarily the same story as in the movie. It's more the story that the movie would be if it were that length of story. I take out stuff that's too complicated for the length. Sometimes I replace it with simpler stuff that's not in the movie. If they can't be bothered to read the screenplay...

I find the best way to write a synopsis is to reread the screenplay once and then retell the story off the top of my head. I try not to refer to the screenplay unless I'm stuck and can't remember. (That's a warning sign that the story may not be flowing properly, by the way.)

A synopsis that's a precise reconstruction of the screenplay story is almost always dull to read. Don't write a real synopsis. Tell the story.

Tags: screenwriting; film

10:20 AM

2 Comments:

The synopsis is definitely harder to write than the script, no matter what the length. I think of the synopsis as "the story of the story," which helps me let go of my dependence on the details.

By  Melanie, at 11:38 AM  

What's really hard to get over to a lot of people, some of whom ought to know better, is just how thoroughly imagined a story has to be before you can synopsise it.

They want the idea in all its essentials in a couple of pages because that's easiest for them to engage with and work from... for me a synopsis or an outline or a treatment is something I arrive at after a helluva lot of trying-out of different ideas. Yet they act as if two pages of story equals two pages of effort, all first-thoughts and no big thing.

By  Stephen Gallagher, at 12:07 PM  

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