I was wondering what caused the majority of us to fail.
Rather than just having bad feelings in the water and dimissing the comp becuase we didn't get through... I wondered if it could be the synposis.
I've always hated writing the things (I guess that's because I don't think I'm any good at writing them).
Who would be willing to share their synposis here so we can pass comment. (I'm a sad old fool, I've kept all three of mine... So I'm willing to share).
Man, I agree with Jay. I'll share my synopsis with anyone and welcome the comments. I hate writing them too. I found this the most difficult thing to get my head around in the playwrighting class I took at City Lit. The synopsis is supposed to be very technical, we were told, a physical description of what happens when with who in the play with very little nuance, theme, detail. But maybe it should be more of a book jacket blurb or a marketing piece. It would be interesting for them to post the synopses of the finalists for comparison value.
And fail is a true word in this case. We failed to make the shortlist... But we're yet to see if that failure was a blessing in disguise.
I'll post my SYNOPSIS when I get back to my other PC Wednesday morning! Let's bitch over those like BB housemates that have discovered the cider is flat.
No Playfull - muine is an audio player for the GNOME personal computer desktop environment. It was a former project director for the development team who gave me that quote.
Here we go then... rip this one apart. Good? Bad? Not enough? Comments please. This is a learning curve.
____________ DENIM
SYNOPSIS Imagine you’re adopted. Imagine that you’re in your thirties and still single. Imagine that every time you meet a potential partner, the same nagging question returns… ‘Could you be my sister?’
GILES, a wannabe author, lives in fear of diluting the gene pool.
PETE, his best mate, wants him out there and shagging.
ZOË, thinks Giles has lost the plot and constantly rejects Pete’s advances.
Set in the Public Bar of STUART’s (Giles’s widowed father) pub, Pete, Zoe and the regulars try to get Giles to realise he unlikely to end up dating an unknown sibling.
Two ethereal characters (a demon and an angel) attempt to influence the course of Giles’s life with less than satisfactory results. Maybe they need to weave their ‘magic’ over others in the area?
But when APRIL, an attractive mature student, and her mother HAZEL take over the lounge to celebrate April’s birthday, hormones get the better of Giles.
Stuart falls for Hazel, but what is he to do when he thinks he might be falling in love with his son’s mother?
Could there really be a genetic connection? What makes a parent a parent? Can you really find love in your local? Can good and evil work together to make something beautiful – or just the beast with two backs?
Giles realises that he still has problems to counter regarding his adoption. Stuart understands that finding love doesn’t mean he’s replacing Giles’s mother. And our demon and angle form a partnership their bosses would be proud of (although only in private).
I can't crit your synopsis because I've read the play and you know I think it's both funny and slightly thought-provoking.
I can't post mine because one's unwritten (and I don't want to let it out of the bag yet), one's boring as hell and one's our collaboration - which I wouldn't want to float freely here!
Okay; boring as it reads; here's the synopsis for 'After the Break';
_________
James Carter runs a small advertising agency – but “it was never like this when I was with Saatchi & Saatchi”. The day starts badly when he finds he’s the first into the office at 9.30am having walked in through a storm – and with a Director stuck in town having suffered his third car accident this year, a designer locked out on a fire escape and an aggressive bank manager complaining about the state of the company’s finances it seems things can’t get much worse – until Carter hears they’ve lost their largest account...
Add a photographer mistaken for a courier, a peripatetic flying rodent salesman, confusion between artwork for a religious society and a pack of pornographic photographs, two Directors who cannot stand the sight of each other, plus rain, lots of rain, and the world of advertising is clearly a far less glamorous one than we may have believed. But by the end of the day, as the sun peeps through the clouds, we come to realise that - as their photographer observes - these people have at least one common, redeeming feature - “they never give up”.
Because they’re all ‘after the break’!
_________
Decent AmDram stuff? Possibly so. Deeply meaningful or visually spectacular for the West End? Definitely not!
The synopsis is supposed to be very technical, we were told, a physical description of what happens when with who in the play with very little nuance, theme, detail. But maybe it should be more of a book jacket blurb
Swann - a good point, and possibly a key one for competitions. Can we maybe get a bit of a concensus on this?
Because I knew / know no better, I wrote my synopsis for After The Break as the book jacket blurb. Jay's seems to be more technical, maybe.
Anyone out there got examples of synopses that have been officially OK'd by anyone, as opposed to a 'best guess' like mine?
OK - Adman's is a technical description of the action (maybe a little too much detail) that dissolves into a book blurb and Jay's is a marketing piece.
Those are not criticisms. But if you read the sample synopsis provided on this site it was a objective description of the action. THis is also how I was taught to write a synopsis in my advanced playwriting course at Citylit. The synopsis is not supposed to give you a flavour of the themes but is supposed to say who is on stage when and where.
Maybe, though, that is wrong. I would love to hear an expert review of that point.
Adman: Someone once told me to avoid rain in screenplays and plays as expensive effects are an early turn-off when a busy producer/reader is trying to make a decision. Just thought I would pass it on. On the other side of that equation was the RSC Mary Stuart production which used rain beautifully. Who knows?
OK, this isn't the synopsis I submitted for TTPT, this is the synopsis of my rewrite that I have submitted to a few agents (some of whom have asked to see the whole play).
I ran my play past two directors who both told me only to provide synopses if they are required. They are best avoided.
And that's all I know.
SYNOPSIS – The Whole of the Moon
Abigail Hunter was the best American actress of her generation. She is now a recluse in London, dogged by bipolar disorder. Abi is married to Simon, an idealistic but lazy television producer. Simon works for David Bravermann, who sees no shareholder profit in idealism.
Abi manages a Christmas visit to her friend John Wheeler at his council estate in Kilburn. He lives in a ground-floor flat that looks out onto a courtyard where the crackheads have strung up fairy lights.
John was with Simon at Cambridge, a celebrated wit and beauty, now forced by MS into a wheelchair. He lives with William, his rent boy/carer. Abi has brought them a Christmas tree, and in trying to get the fairy lights to work, she blows out their already dodgy electricity. Leanne, John’s upstairs neighbour, a poor Irish single mother, appears in the ensuing candle light, fretting about her missing son. She can’t ask for police help or her son Dane will be arrested for violating the ASBO which requires him to stay in the house.
The missing boy and missing electricity ignite Abi’s mania. She recruits Simon and David to help Leanne find Dane and fix the lights. Against Simon’s wishes, David Bravermann convinces her to appear on camera and make the vigil for Dane her comeback. She is interviewed by her husband in front of a cameraman but it dissolves to a marital spat. She retreats to the bathroom where her mania transmutes to pyschosis and she converses with what might be God. This conversation spurs her, now barely grasping sanity, to address the audience directly.
As this action takes place upstairs in Leanne’s flat, Leanne’s son Dane breaks into John and William’s flat downstairs and electrocutes himself on the unrepaired lights. The shock blows his body into the courtyard.
Simon ushers Abi down to the courtyard from Leanne’s flat, on their way to the mental hospital. As they leave the estate, they come upon John and William who have just found Dane’s body in the courtyard. Abi touches Dane and leaves with Simon. Leanne appears and sits down next to her dead son. As she talks with John, Dane appears to wake from the dead.
Simon destroys the video tape of Dane’s waking to protect Abi’s health.
I did say that I hate writing the things - and they could be my greatest weakness in securing a professional production.
It's interesting to see that with just the three syns posted, we've all approched it from a different angle.
I'm going to read and digest all three so that I can see what we've each done and see if there is a way that I can use the best of each to reformat mine and repost it.
I'm interested in you comment about question marks... I like them, as it shows how you expect the audience to emote with the characters. But I'll hold judgement until I re-write the syn.
I'm interested in you comment about question marks... I like them, as it shows how you expect the audience to emote with the characters. But I'll hold judgement until I re-write the syn.
Your job in a synopsis is to give the director a sense of how many actors he would have to hire and whether his set designers have to make an ice cliff or a Bedouin tent. It is not to communicate your expectations about where you expect your audience's sympathies to lie. To be brutal - no one cares about your expectations in this regard. The script is the script and readers will have their own sympathies. And in my experience, my expectations of audience reaction were usually confounded. Thank God! We all have a unique and interesting reaction to art.
Producers want to know the practical ins and outs of the story up front and agents want to know if it is worth reading - not if the platywright thinks that character x is very lovable.
I say that but I also think a synopsis is part marketing, of course, but it's really just opening the kimono and showing them what ya got.
Your job in a synopsis is to give the director a sense of how many actors he would have to hire and whether his set designers have to make an ice cliff or a Bedouin tent...
...but I also think a synopsis is part marketing, of course, but it's really just opening the kimono and showing them what ya got.
Now this really is interesting. Are we not maybe reaching a point where someone, somewhere, has to suggest that there could be at least TWO very different types of synopsis?
I think Swann's first line above makes perfect sense, and if I followed that advice my synopsis for After the Break would read something like
"A comedy set largely in the office of a contemporary ad agency, where the three male staff and three female staff don't really get on and how two male suppliers wreak havoc one day"
Now that's accurate, concise and probably a fair indication of how funny the play is (!) - but for a COMPETITION, might it get you put on the reject pile immediately?
Does one maybe need a more fleshy, Jay-style or blurb-style synopsis specifically for comps?
OK, you made me dig out my notes from class. Here is what I have on synopses.
It should a. Contain the whole play b. Make sense to other people c. Describe briefly the set, time, and the traits and peculiarities of the characters d. it should cover what the plot is and how it is resolved e. it should give the reader a taste of your writing style.
Now, to make it confusing or clear depending on your reading style, a SYNOPSIS is different than a TREATMENT which is different than a BLURB.
It didn't say particularly in my notes to avoid questions, but I am becoming a little anti-question as I work out my theory of synopses.
Here are some other points from the net:
Keep the whole thing to about half a page maximum. A full page if you can't find any other way to do it -- single- or 1.5-spaced.
Start with that one-sentence summary. Or two, if that's what it takes.
Give us a sense of where and when the play's happening.
Focus on your central character. Forget the minor folks: just attach your Character Page.
Try thinking of this as having the structure of a Monologue: You're telling a story. This is very hard to do.
As Jack Web used to say, "Just the facts." Don't include your own wonderful qualitative assessment of the play.
I don't mind sharing this... it's not as if it's going anywhere...
SHE ELEPHANT
The play is set in Sussex, in the present and the action takes place over the afternoon and evening of one day. JOHN LEDYARD, a former Conservative cabinet minister visits his mother's house shortly before a retrospective exhibition of his architect father's life and work. He hopes to persuade his mother to finance a partial realization of one of his father's plans. JOHN feels guilty that many years before; he ignored a summons to his father's bedside and instead fought a by-election and was not present when his father died. Most of his life JOHN has been in conflict with his father's left wing principles. He feels that he disappointed his father and in building what his father failed to build is at one and the same time paying tribute his father's talent and proving himself his father's equal. At the house are DAME RACHEL LEDYARD John's mother, SAMANTHA LEDYARD, John's daughter and FERDY a young architectural historian engaged on the exhibition who is also SAM's boyfriend. DAME RACHEL is "THE SHE ELEPHANT" a title given to her in Africa at the time when her husband was commissioned by the Labour government to build a new capital for a soon to be independent African state. RACHEL looks back at her time in Africa as the happiest time of her life. "The She Elephant" is the matriarch of the herd, who remembers from year to year where water and grazing is to be found on their long migrations. Bull elephants tend to spend their time fighting for the leadership of the herd and of course, having sex.
BEN LEDYARD (whom we see only in flashback) was an opponent of tower blocks and an early advocate of community housing. His ideas dismissed at the time are now fashionable and he is hailed as a prophet. RACHEL refuses JOHN's plan but softens the blow by telling him how much his father loved him and that they were both proud of him. So, at the end there is a kind of reconciliation.
(1) I can't tell from the synopsis who the play is really about. Is it John or Rachel? The synopsis starts telling a play about John and ends describing a play about Rachel.
(2) I would take backstory and characterization and the meaning of the title out of the synopsis completely. I don't think that's the place for them - they take up valuable space that should be used for describing the physical action.
(3) I would take one line to describe the story line of Samantha and Ferdy, otherwise I would take them out of the synopsis.
(4) I would consider telling the story chronologically for purposes of the synopsis. I can't tell, but I think from reading this that the play may be about Ben. I have the same problem in my synopsis as the time of the action moves around - shown in flashbacks: how do you capture a flashback in a synopsis? I tried to resolve it by making my synopsis chronological but the problem with that is that the play bears no immediate resemblance to the synopsis in
