Minimalism in Loglines – Summarizing your story in as few words as possible
Posted on | June 5, 2010 | 11 Comments
I write too long. I know it. My descriptions are too lengthy, my characters talk too much and explain things that don’t need to be explained. And don’t even get me started on inner monologue. As Emperor Joseph II might say, “too many words!”
I’m working on it. Really, I am.
The area I’ve been focusing on lately is the dreaded LOGLINE (half-cousin to the dreaded synopsis, niece of the terrifying elevator speech, and ugly step-sister of the panic-inducing conference pitch).
First Try
A logline is a short, one line summary of your story. I hate summaries, if you haven’t guessed. But they have to be done, so I dug up one from the manuscript I’m about to market, called Chicago Cop.
It was 144 words. 3 paragraphs. Not what you’d call pithy. Sigh.
That’s not a Logline
Some people say your logline should be one sentence and under 25 words. Ugh. I’ve never been able to do that. Until… one night recently I was searching AMC’s TV schedule and I found this blurb for, of all things, The Matrix:
A computer hacker learns his world is a computer simulation.
Could you get more minimal than that? Yes, it’s missing all the cool stuff. No mention of the wonderful special effects in the film, its philosophical undertones, or even how cute Keanu Reeves is. BUT it hints at a lot and that IS what the story is about at it’s core. It’s an anchor. And that’s what I need when I write. Something to remind me what the central, core idea of my story. Something to pull in my wandering mind and make it stick to the point.
So I decided to forget all about characterization, conflict, GMC, etc. etc and just write one sentence about my story. Instead of shooting for the moon, I just kind of freewrote it. Here’s what I came up with:
Chicago detective discovers the Mob is after her for revenge.
Of course, you don’t know this story, but for me, this does hit the nail on the head. It’s what this story is all about.
This was a very liberating process. Writing that sentence was kind of a revelation. If I’d written it beforehand, it would have kept me centered as I wrote the manuscript and might have made the book easier to write.
Good enough?
The sentence above is a terrific anchor for writing the book. But is it good enough for selling it? Probably not.
In his wonderfully entertaining book Save the Cat!, Blake Snyder contends, “A good logline is the coin of the realm in Hollywood and can be traded like currency with those who appreciate it.”
In his brilliant work Emotional Structure, Peter Dunne says, “If you know your idea as if it were second nature they [the studios] will trust you to stay on point with it and deliver what they’re buying. Studios will invest a lot of money in you and your idea, and having confidence in your concise thinking is critical to their comfort in making that investment.”
How to spice things up?
Second Try
In her online article , How to write a logline E Hughes mentions that movie posters advertised the Matrix this way: “The fight for the future begins.” (The poster is way cool. Even though it’s an old movie, it gives me chill bumps).
Hughs embellishes the poster line this way:
“The fight for the future begins when a computer hacker learns the world exists in the sophisticated alternate reality of a computer program called ‘The Matrix’”.
Hmm. Not that far from:
A computer hacker learns his world is a computer simulation.
It’s that sentence on steroids. The main punch comes from the keyword “fight.” Not surprising. “Fight” equals conflict. And conflict equals story. Could I get “fight” into my logline? I gave it another try.
Chicago police detective Maggie Delaney fights an unknown killer bent on revenge.
Fight” doesn’t work so well in this sentence. How about this?
Chicago police detective Maggie Delaney tracks down a Mob hit man who is after her for revenge.
Better, but it lacks urgency. Here’s another try:
In Chicago Cop, police detective Maggie Delaney must track down a Mob hit man bent on revenge before he strikes again.
Okay, but it doesn’t have the uniuqeness of the story, especially not the way the Matrix logline does. Once more with feeling:
In Chicago Cop, police detective Maggie Delaney must track down a Mob hit man bent on revenge against her for putting away his boss.
Eureka! That’s it. Chicago Cop is a detective thriller, so “tracks down” seemed to work better than “fight” in my last sentence above. And that sentence? 21 words! Now that’s a logline.
To Summarize
I’ve learned a lot from this exercise. Writing a logline not only seems more doable, it’s kind of exciting. Here’s what I intend to do in the future:
1. Relax, let down my guard and freewrite my single summary sentence.
2. Then find the central conflict in my story and try to use the word “fight” in the sentence.
3. If “fight” doesn’t work, use a verb that’s central to the core conflict of my genre.
I hope this exploration has inspired you or at least given you some food for thought when you have to write a summary of your next story.
So how about it? Do you struggle with loglines the way I do? Do you write them at the beginning or end of your process? Do you have one you’d like to share? I’d love to see some.
Tags: Blake Synder > Emotional Structure > Loglines > Peter Dunne > Save the Cat! > writing craft
Viral Excerpts Part II – How to make your excerpt sizzle
Posted on | January 24, 2010 | 8 Comments
In my last post, I talked about making the first pages of your manuscript a free gift — a valuable gift — to your readers. That’s a mindset you can use to improve the quality of your writing. Look at it from a reader’s perspective and ask: Is this really valuable to me?
This post, part II, discusses technique. Don’t forget, this can apply to:
- Excerpts on your website
- Contest entries
- Submissions to editors and agents
When it comes to submissions, we all know how important your first sentence, first paragraph, first page is. If you haven’t grabbed an editor or agent by the first page, that’s when she (or he) reaches for the rejection form.
In his fabulous book, “Hooked: write fiction that grabs readers at page one and never lets them go,” Les Edgerton contends that most writers don’t get read by editors and agents because of bad beginnings. A sobering thought.
So HOW do you make your first words sizzle?
Here are some basic, MUST haves to get you started on creating that perfect opening to your terrific story.
1. Cut the Backstory
I am the self-proclaimed backstory Queen. Info-dump is my middle name. I love backstory. And backstory is important. It gives your characters depth and keeps them from being cardboard cutouts. Backstory, after all, is where your character’s Internal Conflict came from, right?
Yes, but it still doesn’t belong in the first chapter. At least, not more than just a hint of it.
One of the best articles I’ve read recently on how to cut backstory from your opening is on Romance University. In that post, Theresa Stevens, Managing Editor at Red Sage recommends using choice, action, and conflict instead of “explaining” (a.k.a info-dumping) to illustrate a backstory problem a character is wrestling with.
She says: “Your job at this point is not to “fill the reader in” on all the details of the landscape. Your job is to lure them in with conflict and dynamic change, and keep them guessing.”
2. Cut the Internal Musings
Closely related to backstory is internal monologue. A critique partner I once had used to remind me my characters shouldn’t be sitting around and thinking. That’s good advice.
Your opening should be a scene. A scene, not a sequence. And any scene, especially the first one in your story, should be action-driven. Internal monologue happens when a character REACTS. A “scene” dominated by that type of reaction should only come after a scene WITH action.
Actions come from decisions a character makes, often under duress. If all this isn’t happening RIGHT NOW for the character, then … maybe you’re not starting your story at the right place. Ouch.
3. There is nothing like a GOAL…
…nothing in the world (sung to the tune from South Pacific).
You can hardly overemphasize the importance of goals in fiction. All of your characters should have goals. Your protagonist, your co-protagonist, your antagonist, even your secondary characters should have goals. Lots of them. Story goals, Act goals, scene goals, Internal goals, External goals.
Without a goal your story has no point. It meanders around with less direction than a river (since a river will eventually get to the ocean).
I like to watch nature shows in the evening with my hubby because they’re a relaxing escape from the stress of the day. As I observed one recently with hooded gaze, I thought. This would be an example of good entertainment that didn’t have goals.
Wrong.
In a nature show, there’s always some story about a nest of baby eagles who might not survive, or a wolf who gets separated from the pack and can’t find a meal. The common goal? Survival. Nothing more basic than that. If those shows didn’t have the narrator filling in the details of the threat to survival (the Conflict), nobody would watch them.
Anytime you have a scene that’s falling flat, ask yourself: What is the POV (point-of-view) character’s goal in this scene. I’ll bet your answer will be something like, “Aaaah, I don’t know!” There you go. The character doesn’t have a goal.
Of course, there’s usually more than one character in a scene, so the other character ALSO has to have a goal. And should they be the SAME goal? Altogether now. NO!!! The other character should have an OPPOSITE goal, to create… you guessed it…CONFLICT.
As you can see, we’re getting back to the basics of GMC (Goal, Motivation, and Conflict).
4. You don’t have enough CONFLICT.
Yes, I do. No, you don’t. But it’s right there, see? No. It’s just not enough….
Easy, isn’t it? Except when you’re writing the opening lines of your story. Why is that? That’s a question for therapists to answer. Suffice it to say, you MUST have conflict in your opening pages.
That doesn’t mean your characters are punching each other in the face (though that would make an attention-getting opening). It does mean that there’s disagreement. Resistance. Friction.
Ever notice the word “agony” in “protagonist” and “antagonist”? The job of these characters is to give each other pain, to drive each other crazy! It can range from all-under-the-surface to a full-blown, heated argument (might be better to build up to that, but it depends on the story).
In a romance, the opening pages are often the “meet scene” between heroine and hero (also something that’s hard to do). So there has to be some conflict between these two. But at the same time, there also has to be attraction, balanced with the conflict. In other words, your romance shouldn’t start like this:
“Hi there,” he said. “You’re the best looking woman I’ve ever met.”
“I was just thinking the same thing about you. I mean, as a man.”
He grinned. “What to go find a closet and get it on?”
“Sure!”
Theresa Stevens advises, “Conflict is the engine that drives every page of a well-told tale.” This means we need conflict throughout the entire book. You’ve worked hard on your novel and you may have a lot of wonderful conflict in it. That’s great. Just don’t forget that if you leave conflict out of your first page, the rest of your book may not get read.
Now it’s time to get busy and rework those openings. Before you do, can anyone turn that scene I started around and give it some conflict?
Viral Excerpts – Make your first words a free gift
Posted on | January 4, 2010 | 9 Comments
In getting this blog up and running, I’ve been doing some research on viral marketing. It’s an interesting topic.
Viral marketing is marketing that spreads like a virus (a good one) via social networks and blogs. As webopedia states it, viral marketing is “positive word-of-mouth brand awareness.”
Sounds, well, infectious, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t we all love to have Facebook’s 300 million users reading our books?
What does this mean for writers?
There are a lot of ways to apply viral marketing to a writing career. One of the strategies that caught my eye is a free giveaway of a product.
The trick is not to give away something equivalent to the clothes you toss out when cleaning your closet, but to give away something of value. In marketing this idea is called WIIFM. (What’s in it for me?) In other words, don’t just focus on what your website will do for you. Focus on what it will do for your readers.
For example, we see giveaways on published author sites, especially on blogs in exchange for comments:
- Anna DeStephano gives away a Dream Flutters necklace for posting on her blog, if your comment is chosen.
- Margie Lawson often gives away her coveted lecture packets when she guest blogs to the winning commenter.
- On Petit Fours and Hot Tamales, we gave a $25 gift certificate to the winning commenter of our online book Aspen Expose.
There is also information that’s just plain free:
- Dianna Love and Mary Buckham offer free articles on their Break Into Fiction website.
- My blog sister Tammy Schubert gives away free technical information on her website.
- Here on Linsey’s Diary, I’ve created a list of Cool Links of important information for the writer who wants to become or to stay published. I hope to add to this list as time goes by. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.
But I’d like to apply the idea to something else
Someone mentioned to me recently that more and more, editors and agents are looking for online excerpts of your writing. For the not-yet-published, this usually means the first 500 to 1,000 words of a manuscript.
We all know how important the first chapter, the first paragraph, even the first line of your manuscript is. If you haven’t grabbed most editors by the first page, many of them stop reading.
So how can you make your excerpts worthy of an editor’s or agent’s attention?
Think of them as a free giveaway.
And now for the hard questions to ask yourself:
- Is my excerpt something a reader would think valuable? Or is it the equivalent of a cheap party favor?
- Is my excerpt something that could start a viral wave of fury? Would people be blogging about it? Twittering their friends about it?
- If my excerpt were the last thing I ever wrote, would I want to be remembered for it?
Tough, huh?
Yes, but no tougher than the demands of editors, agents, and your future readers.
How do you make your excerpt that good? Hmm. Sounds like a topic for another post. Stay tuned…
I’m really preaching to myself in this article. I intend to greatly increase my submission rate in 2010 and over the years I’ve learned beginnings are my biggest weakness. This year, I’m going to work on that and make my openings shine. How about you?