If you cannot write a concise and clear synopsis, it is probably because you don't yet know what the heart of your story is. Trying to write a synopsis --without details of plots or events -- forces you to find the heart, the core, the central issues -- of your story. Once you have found the core of your story, you will be able more easily to decide which details or events will support that core.
Below are samples of some synopses. Each of these is less than 100 words in length, even though each synopsis below describes the main issues of an entire feature-length film
Monsters, Inc.
The monsters of Monstropolis
provide energy for their city by capturing the screams of children they scare
at night. But the monsters feel that the
children themselves are toxic and contact must be avoided at all costs. Sully, the champion scarer
of Monsters Inc, accidentally brings a child into the monsters’ world, only to
find that she is not toxic and that children’s laughter can provide more energy
to Monstropolis than their screams.
The Matrix
A young computer hacker, Neo, is introduced to a
group of people who teach him that the world Neo thinks he lives in is actually
a computer simulation run by a race of machines. The machines farm human beings for the energy
they produce to run the world of the machines, keeping the humans in a
vegetative state and placating their minds with the computer simulation of a
human world. Neo trains to increase his
physical, mental, and spiritual abilities and eventually becomes capable of
overpowering the machines.
Apocalypse Now
During the Vietnam war, a young Marine Special-Forces
soldier, Captain Willard, is assigned by the military to assassinate a senior Marine
officer, Colonel Kurtz, who has set up his own world and own army of natives in
Cambodia. Willard travels up the river
into the wilderness in search of Kurtz, encountering increasingly primitive and
brutal events along the way. Willard
eventually kills Kurtz, but Willard’s understanding of
good and evil is changed forever as a result of his experiences.