I had a brain-storm the other day. Or maybe it was just a brain-fart. At any rate, it was an idea: What if there were a web site where you could get plot summaries? Movies, TV shows, books, comic books, the whole shebang. They’d be short, less than a page, and would cover the basic plot points of a work, including the set up and twists and turns and pay offs.
What’s the point? As a writer and creative type there’s just too many stories out there I want to know about. This would give me a chance to digest the basic story without having to spend my whole live in front of the TV or in a book. Of course it wouldn’t be the same experience, of course you wouldn’t get it all, but it’d give you taste. And that’s better than nothing.
As you try to think of interesting plots and intriguing stories, what better inspiration than the thousands of stories that have been told in comics, movies, books and TV shows? There aren’t any new stories anyway, just rehashings of the same story, so why not offer a way to ingest as many of those rehashings as possible? Why not know that you’re alluding to such and such piece of classic literature and taking off on a story that’s been done by Star Trek and Alias and Back to the Future? (Does such a story exist? I don’t know–I’ve never seen more than an episode of Alias or a handful of Star Trek)
And maybe something like this already exists. It’s possible. It seems likely. Though it also seems likely that it’d be mixed with reviews and criticism and all that other junk. I’m not so interested in that stuff, I just want the barebones stories.
A similar and just as interesting concept would be character summaries, especially as they relate to each other. I love the idea of archetypal characters and character relationships, like the Arthur/Lancelot/Gwenevere trio that we see again and again and again (Luke/Han Solo/Leia, Neo/Morpheus/Trinity, Buffy/Willow/Xander, etc.).
Yeah, brain-fart.
Update: Here’s a site that gives away endings and offers some basic plot summaries: Ruined Endings. It gives longer plot summaries than the back of the DVD box, but not as detailed as I’d like. It is something though.
That’s not a brain fart!
I think the site would only work if readers and general users were able to submit their own synopses of stories, and other users were able to edit them or correct them. So you’d have a whole swarm of people giving you content, and if people cared, the content would get better, and better, and better as time went on. You could even have a ratings system so that the additions/corrections with the highest ratings would be the main ones displayed on that story’s page.
I’d contribute! I’ve actually been looking for a site like this, and found a few crappy ones, but nothing very good or worthwhile. The key is to make sure that it’s not a reviews site. It’s not about opinions of the story. It’s about the facts of the story.
What do you think… storylines.com? :-)
Oh! And even cooler addition would be if the user could zoom in or out on the plot to see more or less detail of it, like you can zoom in and out of a satellite photo to get the same effect. So if you wanted a 10-second synopsis, you’d zoom out to the point where you could see the whole “line” (working the name of the site into the visual representation), and if you wanted to spend more time on it, you could zoom in and get more details about any section.
It would be really interesting to see the lines for time-shifting movies like Memento or Primer.
Wow, hello internet laziness. Go to a bookstore and pick up some Cliff Notes you crazy people who can’t use your legs. AKA- I won’t use it if it ain’t digital people.
Heh. I suppose there are quite a few places for this kind of thing, Kevin. Maybe not just one site, but just about every decent book and movie has a fan site that does a synopsis, then you have IMDB, Netflix, and other movie places to get a synopsis of TV shows and stuff. Incomplete, I suppose, but somewhat there.
Josh, I know what you’re saying with the contribution thing, but that might be a bit trickier to swing than just 1 or a couple more people running a site and doing it all. Maybe have comments, forums, or something, but figuring out a way for info to be submitted, categorized, and maybe added would be mighty complex.
The zoom thing I REALLY like: you could probably make it look and sound spiffy, while covering the fact that it’s a simple search feature, heh.
I really should start doing something like this with all my movie recommendations or something. I’m sure most of us wouldn’t mind adding to a site like this.
Neal, normally I’d agree with your caution about how difficult this idea would be to carry off correctly, but look at Wikipedia! How much less complex is this plot summary idea than an amazingly-complete encyclopedia of all human knowledge? And that thing’s lookin’ pretty good! I think if we understood the model Wikipedia uses for information submission and correction, we could use it and have a really great site. Obviously it’s based on wiki technology, but there’s a bit more to it than that.