Top 20 Synopsis Quotes & Sayings

A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you're going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you're going all out.

An author's ability to bring a marketing synopsis to the table - along with a great manuscript - makes a difference in what books get picked up. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction titles. You need to show your publisher what you've got in your marketing arsenal.

It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared - as it always should be.

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design.

I feel a lot of pressure when I'm writing because I know, you know, if they looked at a synopsis of the book, what they read could only confirm all the stereotypes that they have about us and about people like us.

I produced a play in New York that got nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best American Play.The play is called Stalking The Bogeyman. It was a story on This American Life, and my former roommate is the artistic director of the New York Repertory Theater. He heard the NPR show, contacted them, and essentially - shortest synopsis ever, like I'm the Cablevision guide button - it's the true story of a man stalking and plotting to kill the man who raped him when he was seven. It's by a brilliant reporter named David Holthouse.

... And we talk it out. Lately, I've had Roy Thomas come in, and he sits and makes notes while we discuss it. Then he types them up, which gives us a written synopsis. Originally - I have a little tape recorder - I had tried taping it, but then I found no one on staff has time to listen to the tape again later. But this way he makes notes, types it quickly, I get a carbon, the artist gets a carbon ... so we don't have to worry that we'll forget what we've said.

I was telling my manager that I wanted to quit the industry because the synopsis I was receiving from filmmakers all felt like a lie. Yes, they were heroine-centric... but the concepts were simple. Like a rape victim, her struggling against the odds and gaining revenge, or a wife who supports her husband endlessly, or a sacrificial mother.

I don't write a synopsis, I don't write a treatment. I write scene by scene.

I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.

In France now, there's no problem with official censorship. Once your movie is finished, you always are R-rated. My movie is just R-rated in France. But when you meet French producers with a script like mine, they behave like the most fragile chickens in the world. They just tell you "Oh, no. You should cut this. You should cut that." And at the end you have been totally censored on the synopsis, and then on the script.

I am asked to submit a 2-3 page synopsis to my publisher ahead of time, so by the time I begin writing, I have a fair idea of where the story will begin, the main conflicts, and the basic ending point. But that still leaves plenty of room for changes and discovery along the way.

A synopsis of every story we do: someone gets over their own stupid ass.

Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.

I hate even the idea of a synopsis. When stories are really working, when you're providing subtextual exploration and things that are deeply layered, you're obligated to not say things out loud.

I was not aware of alopecia before 'Gone Kesh,' and when I heard the synopsis, read the script, I realized how ignorant we are about people's lifestyles and their issues.

I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.

Rza just used the whole synopsis of the karate flick and capitalised offa that around this music. Some things you find out and you compare to yourself, and you're like, 'Wow, it has so much comparison to it', you start to live like that. And that's what happened - we started callin' ourselves Wu-Tang.

I can't just react on the strength of an email and three pages of synopsis, and say I'm going to take off for three months of my life.