Loglines are essential to writing movies. There are entire books and seminars about writing log lines.
Recently, I got a book from Writer’s Digest where one of the authors advocated using loglines as a blueprint for writing novels – except they were completely unfamiliar with loglines, and essentially were re-inventing the wheel.
Loglines are a one or two sentence summation of a movie. “An amateur boxer down on his luck gets the shot at the big time when a professional boxer chooses him for an opponent for a big time boxing match, and a chance at the same time to win the love of his sweetheart.”
There you go. Rocky. I’ve actually never seen it, and people tell me it’s a great movie. All I know is that Stallone set an all time record for writing a screenplay that I have to beat – he wrote the movie in eight hours, sitting up all night in front of a typewriter after watching a boxing match on TV.
So at some point, I have to write one in seven hours!
Karl Iglesias summed it up with a template that reads, “(title) is a (genre) about a (description of hero) who, after (inciting incident) wants to (outer goal) by (plan of action). This becomes increasingly difficult because (complications and obstacles)”.
That’s a little wordy for me – I tend to like action. A punch in the nose really eliminates a lot of dialogue.
so, Karl has loglines for people like me, too. “(title) is a (genre) about a (description of hero) who must (outer goal) or else (dire consequences)”.
Like… “Die Hard is an action/thriller/police drama about a cop from New York who must defeat a group of heavily armed terrorists that have taken hostages or his estranged wife and the other hostages will be killed.”
There’s a lot that’s not there. But this is where we start planning our novel!
I’m inclined to throw out another log line: “Deep Hurting is about a temp worker who is shot into space and forced to watch bad movies by two evil scientists, and must resist being driven mad by the movies or they will enslave the world.”
Mike is better than Joel.
Anyway (!), now you’ve got the formula.
This is your first step to determine what your novel will be – an actually, it’s essentially what you do anyway – but there’s no conscious decision to force the log line to plot your novel.
So, write your log line, right now. Open Scrivener, go to your new project (if you haven’t made one yet, shame on you, we did it yesterday!) and you’re going to write your log line in the right hand window of the inspector, in the window labeled “Project Notes”. If you don’t see the inspector, click the blue “I” button.
We’re almost ready!
