More on Loglines…..
In the last post I mentioned a couple of expert approaches to one-line summaries. Well here is the second expert:
The late great Blake Syder, author of (among other things) Save the Cat. If this isn’t on your reading list yet, it ought to be. What Save the Cat covers (among other things) really well is all of this stuff about finding your genre (and Blake Syder has some great story genres too which I might briefly touch on in a later post but anyway you really should read his book).
What Mr Save the Cat proposes is that you need your logline (your one-liner) to do 4 things to win over your audience. It must:
- Have a sense of IRONY
- Create a compelling MENTAL PICTURE
- Give a sense of AUDIENCE and COST
- A great TITLE
(These actually aren’t that different from the previous post, but they’re looking at it from different angles. They’re the same thing in a different co-ordinate system if that means something to you (i.e. you like graphs).)
Some of these speak for themselves. I won’t go into great detail here because Blake Syder does it much better than me. What I will do is spin his excellent movie-based versions of this into something a little bit more series based:
Irony or “The best person to be the hero of a story is the worst person to be in that situation.” – because they will face the greatest challenges by being there. A mild-mannered chemistry teacher becomes a hard-baked drug dealer. The youngest son of a mafia family tries to break the cycle of revenge but is drawn in when the father he loves is gunned down. An off-duty cop coming home for the holidays finds himself caught up in a siege. A man who hates other people finds himself running a hotel. Two hopeless underachievers find themselves the last remaining humans in the universe… Of all the people to be in this situation…
Why this is important is it focusses on character (HERO). And it focuses on a situation (GOAL). And the less well suited, the better. (CONFLICT)
So would you rather watch a sitcom about
– A survival expert who finds himself marooned on a desert island with only another SAS member for company? or
– A survival expert finds himself marooned on a desert island with a group of bickering committee members from a small town rotary club?
Worst situation for this person.
Next is the need for a compelling mental picture. What does this mean? It means I say it and you SEE it. In my experience, the key to this is detail. In fact, in most writing the key is detail. I’ll cover that in a post later. (get used to that phrase). I don’t say “island” I say desert island. Bickering. Committee. Rotary club. All writing is poetry. Choose what can only be described as visually explosive words. If you don’t have that level of detail, what you have is the following:
A generic man who hates monsters finds himself trapped in a vague location being chased by a monster of some kind.
Yeah. You don’t like that do you? So be crystal.
A sense of audience and cost – this is effectively dictated in your description. Things like LOCATION can be expensive. Think of places YOU can take a camera. Then think of what it would cost YOU to get there. Want to shoot in your flat/house/office/bar? Easy. Want to shoot in New Zealand. Or on another planet? Gonna cost ya.
Audience also includes CAST and GENRE. Lots of young people being hacked to death in between having sex? That’s a younger audience. Lots of old people talking about how getting old is shit. That’s an older audience. Talking dogs with famous handsome men and women in the lead and in-jokes for the grown-ups, that’s a family series. Movies. TV Series. Same same.
But what about Breaking Bad! (I hear you cry) He’s over forty! And loads of 16-34 year olds watched that (we think, if only Netflix would release their viewing figures!) It’s about a man having a mid-life crisis.
Yeeeees. And it’s about hard core drugs. And violence. You decide. Let me just say, it’s not May to December. Who the audience is, is very useful to a producer or commissioner because THEY KNOW WHO THEIR AUDIENCE IS. So we’re back to ORIGINALITY VS FORMULA…
Nail your audience, include it in the description somehow. Use cast, use THEMES…
Finally Title.
Read titles. Decide which one’s you like. They’re full of clues. There tend to be two ways you can with this:
To the point, with a hint of cleverness. This is a titles that focuses in one aspect of the show, as well as telling you something about the attitude to it. (Scrubs, Cheers, Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Six Feet Under, Phoneshop). In this category often a double meaning can add something (Trollied). But be careful. Not everyone loves a pun as much as you (or me)
Wild and intriguing. (House of Cards. Breaking Bad. Mad Men).
If you choose wild and intriguing you have to be able to hand someone the reason for the title in the first introduction to it. It’s called Breaking Bad because it’s about a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who “Breaks Bad” or goes off the rails. It’s called Mad Men because they’re the Ad Men of Madison Avenue. Make it wild if you like, but you must be prepared to explain it. Quickly.
Titles come last because you can always change them. That isn’t an excuse to come up with a shit title then write the words (Working Title) behind it. If you’ve created “Chateau Lafite Rothschild” then don’t expect to sell it with the label “Yellow Fizz (Working Title)”.
So that’s the Blake Syder Break down of what he calls the “logline from hell”. If you haven’t read his book – I would urge you to do so.
But come back here soon too please!
Next up…
Themes…(probably)
Happy Writing!