Ruminations of an Old Goat

I've been reading a book on writing screenplays and have found some of the suggestions within the book quite useful and applicable beyond screenplays. The book is Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. Snyder deviates from the "normal" approach to writing a screenplay in chapter one. Most people would expect to write an outline or a treatment or something similar to that as their first step. Snyder says to start with the logline.

What's a logline? Simply put, it's a one or two sentence description of your story. It's what you use to grab the attention of an agent or producer. It's what you say to Steven Spielberg if you find yourself in an elevator with him. It's your story boiled down to the absolute minimum necessary to convey an idea of the characters and the conflict. For example:

A jaded WWII casino owner in Nazi-occupied Morocco sees his former lover arrive, accompanied by her husband whose heroism forces the hero to choose between his cynicism, his feeling for his ex-lover, and his once-strong feelings of patriotism.

I expect most of you will recognize Casablanca pretty easily. Consider what we can learn from this logline. We get the main character and his outlook on life, the setting, the catalysts of change (ex-lover and her husband) and the battle our character must fight. Here's another example:

An idealistic farm boy, a cynical scoundrel and a feisty princess race to destroy the Deathstar, the evil Galactic Empire's ultimate weapon, before the weapon can be used to destroy their Rebel Alliance.

The movie, obviously, is Star Wars, though George Lucas never wrote that logline. I wrote it as another example of a logline. Without seeing the movie, we can pretty easily envision our three primary characters. By using the word "race" we know that time is a factor. Finally, we learn this is a battle of good versus evil with the fate of the Rebel Alliance hanging in the balance. There's a lot of story not covered by the logline, Darth Vader being the most obvious and most important part of the story unrevealed, but that one sentence neatly conveys the heart of Star Wars (even if I do say so myself).

The idea behind producing a logline first is to reduce your story to its absolute basic elements. It forces you to really think about your story, your characters and your conflict. It forces you to truly understand the most important elements of your story before you spend days, weeks or months writing the story. It's because of this extreme focus that I believe most fiction writers would benefit from creating loglines before tackling any long work, be it a novel or a screenplay.

Some people like to discuss the "bones" of a story. If the bones are the story structure from which you build the meat of your story, then the logline is the spine of the story, from which you build the bones. Call it structure for your structure, if you will.

This approach has gotten me thinking about my stories in terms of loglines. I've got ideas that have been spinning around in my head for decades that have never really "come together" as a coherent story. Looking at those ideas now, I believe the reason they won't jell is because what I have is a bunch of neat scenes rather than an actual story. I couldn't create a logline for a single one of those ideas. Despite having thought about them for years and years, I haven't settled on who the characters really are nor what their true conflict is. Now, at least, I have a starting point for turning those neat scenes into a story.

Bitter enemies. Reluctant allies. At Star's End, they fight a desperate battle for the future of humanity.

I hope that logline conveys space opera, war between human factions and an alien threat that forces the warring factions into a reluctant alliance. Let me know if it doesn't because that's the tentative logline for the screenplay I plan to write as part of Script Frenzy.