Logline Exercises, Part 2

Let’s make another sentence into a baby logline.

I’m working through how to craft a baby logline from a story idea that was first expressed in a sentence.

Here’s the template for the baby logline:

A hero wants to enter a new world, but there’s a catch, and at the death moment, they’ll regret wanting to do it this way.

I referred to a logline for The Bourne Identity (2002) in the last post (“Logline Exercises, Part 1”). Here’s an example drawn from Yes Man (2008). I wrote this logline myself.

A heartbroken man wants to say yes to love again, but his self-help program insists he has to say yes to every opportunity for one year. When his new love breaks up with him for deceiving her about the program, he regrets ever saying yes to it.

It works pretty well. With the self-help program, he gets what he wants: new love! But he went about it in a flawed Act 2 way: he wasn’t honest with his new love. And breaking her trust means he got himself right back where he started: with another broken heart. It’s a pretty tight storyline for a hero’s transformation.

Here’s the sentence I wrote in my earlier post, “Write Your Story Idea in a Sentence,” to express my story idea for Running From Office:

A mild-mannered young man engages in increasingly scandalous behavior to sabotage his election, for the third time, to the US Senate, but he has to find out who’s manipulating the system before his whole life is wasted just to maintain his party’s majority.

And here’s today’s baby logline for Running From Office:

A mild-mannered young man wants to avoid being elected to the US Senate for a third term, but secret forces are manipulating the system to maintain his party’s majority, and when he loses the election to a corrupt candidate, he regrets sabotaging his own candidacy.

That wasn’t too bad. I have a hero who wants to stop something from happening, and an antagonist who wants to keep that thing happening. (See my previous entry “The Hero Starts & Stops.”) Election manipulation may be a burden to establish, however. How does this work again? It’s starting to feel clunky and unfun. The hero seems passive, acted upon rather than driving the action. I also need to make the stakes urgent and personal for our hero because there’s a “Who cares” moment. So what if he loses to a corrupt candidate? Who cares? He needs to care.

So here’s another shot at Running From Office.

A cynical literary agent wants to find out who’s running an online campaign to get him elected, against his wishes, as New York City’s next mayor, but a computer hacker hounds him at every stage of his investigation. When he discovers the hacker is his neglected son, he wishes he could rewrite his life.

It was a satire about voting manipulation. Now it’s a thriller about revenge. I went from Adam McKay to Scott Turow. It’s a big shift in my vision of the story.

Or maybe I could make it an Ebenezer Scrooge story! 

The agent comes to see the error of his ways and repairs his relationship with his son. That’s nice. I could do that one. The son’s campaign for his father could present his father in the way the son wishes his father was. I like that. I could write it as a father’s journey from cynicism to hope.

So why am I making you read over my shoulder as I think my way through this logline? 

So you can see my thought process in action. I’m writing loglines, asking questions, trying to find solutions, writing another version of a logline, asking more questions, and so on. And most importantly, I’m asking myself if I even want to continue working on a particular logline. Maybe it’s gotten away from me and become a story I don’t feel comfortable writing.

Paying attention to how you feel about the story you’re envisioning is part of the process. You want to craft a logline for who you are as a writer.

That’s why I allowed myself the liberty of rearranging elements of Running From Office into a logline, but then I need to wrangle that logline back into a tone and genre that fit me. 

I don’t want to write a satire or thriller. That’s not me. 

I do want to write a story about a bad father who grows into a good father all because of his son.

A cynical literary agent wants to find out who’s running an unauthorized campaign presenting him as a lovably heroic candidate for New York City’s next mayor, but a computer hacker hounds his every move. When he discovers the person behind it all is his neglected son, he wishes he could rewrite his life.

I like the family angle. I can relate to the desire of the son to improve his father with an outrageous mayoral campaign, and I can relate to the literary agent wanting to uncover who’s behind presenting a false persona of him to the public.

I also like the irony of a literary agent being presented as a persona to the public because it’s akin to presenting an author’s persona to the public. The son wants his father to become that persona not as mayor of New York but as father to him.

I’m sure there’s yet a story to be told about secret forces manipulating elections to put an unwilling candidate in office. That was my original Groundhog Day-meets-The Candidate concept.

But I feel more affinity for my father/son story. 

I can imagine a son so starved for his father’s attention that he concocts a fake mayoral campaign that spreads all over New York, and I can imagine a cranky man of books being forced to respond to wide public recognition and having to grow because of it.

A father can run from office, but he can’t run from the one vote that truly counts.

_____

PHOTO: A photo of New York at night