Logline Exercises, Part 3

Let’s do it again, this time with feeling.

I suggested in an earlier post (“Story Ideas”) that you can come up with story ideas by identifying milestones in life and messing with them. I observed that kids go to school to prepare for life as young adults, so maybe adults should go to school to prepare for their next phase of life.

That’s how I arrived at the idea that middle-aged adults should attend an empty-nesters seminar to prepare for their adult children moving out.

In my post, “Write Your Story Idea in a Sentence,” I wrote this:

On the verge of divorce after their adult children move out, a couple attends an Arizona seminar for empty-nesters, but when they invite a down-on-their-luck couple to return home with them, they have to resolve their differences before this couple kicks them out of the nest.

It seems like a rite-of-passage comedy, but there’s work to be done. Who’s the hero? What’s the setup desire? What’s the nature of the hero’s transformation?

I have to find a way to express the story in this format:

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.

Here’s a baby logline.

A husband wants to attend an empty-nesters seminar with his estranged wife, but when he invites a con-artist couple into their home, he regrets thinking a seminar could save his marriage.

Kinda awkward. There’s a switch from the seminar being the source of the trouble to this new couple being the trouble. And the hero’s setup desire shouldn’t be to attend a seminar. That’s accomplished too easily. Our hero’s true desire is to stay married to his wife after their kids have moved out.

A husband wants to save his marriage with counseling for empty-nesters, but his wife is attracted to the counselor, and when the counselor gets his wife pregnant, he regrets trying to save his marriage.

Yeesh. That took a weird turn. The husband seems way too passive. Things are happening to him. He’s not making things happen. And the wife would be pregnant at forty-something? It is ironic, though: she wants new love and gets another bird in the nest. He wants to stay married and gets the worst of scenarios.

What arrived fresh in my mind as a rite-of-passage romcom is souring into a drama with no final act.

The final act could be that the husband has to fly the coop and wish his wife all the best and try to find meaning for himself. Or maybe he moves in with one of his kids? I have no idea. I have to go back to my original idea and rediscover why I thought there might be a romcom here. For now, it’s a work in progress!

At this stage, I’m still fitting together the blocks and springs of my story ideas, and that often means most of these things just won’t work out, not on Day One.

Or Day Twenty-one.

Crafting a logline can expose a weakness in my idea, but it can also expose a weakness in my own desire to write this particular story. 

Maybe I need to think more, or maybe I’m realizing the idea isn’t clicking with me. I have an idea, but I don’t care enough. Do I even want to write about empty-nesters?

Some ideas I work out in a year or three. I had what I thought was a good idea in 2010, but I haven’t worked it out yet. I’ve written loglines, started chapters, and worked out several outlines. I just can’t crack it, but I know there’s something there.

Sometimes I never go back to an idea or logline. It doesn’t click with me. I may have had the idea, but it’s not my kind of story. I’d rather find this out during the logline process than after an exploratory 10,000 words.

Sometimes, though, I share an idea or logline with others, and they see something I can’t. I once told one of my story ideas to a good friend, Jason Tselentis, and he told me my problem was genre. I was trying to make a detective story out of a concept built for horror or a western. I’d never thought of that, and I have no idea how he saw that so fast. But he did, and it made so much sense.

At least Jason diagnosed my condition in the logline stage. I once wrote a whole screenplay before I realized I had a genre problem. I asked my wife to read my script, which I thought, for some reason, was a comedy, and my wife was horrified to discover how violent the script was.

“This is not a comedy,” she said. “This is horror.”

Oh, boy. Of course, it was. Why did I not see that? Right. I guess I’d lost my way trying to cross the river from story idea to logline and gotten swept downstream by my own delusions.

I guess I had a blob for a storyline and not a spine or a trunk.

Solution?

Back to the logline!

Let’s give the empty-nesters one more go. 

I’m going to grab the template I wrote for Yes Man (2008) and see if that helps me.

Here’s Yes Man.

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.

Here’s a logline for my empty-nesters.

An empty-nester wants to reignite his marriage, but a new school for middle-aged empty-nesters insists on group projects. When his wife leaves him to date the school’s most popular man, he wishes he could drop out of life.

I’m thinking this is like a midlife reboot of high school. Maybe back in high school, the popular kid dumped his future wife, and our hero dated her on the rebound. Now his wife gets another chance to date the popular guy, and our hero — after recovering from the death moment of heartbreak — realizes he’s already fallen for another woman at the empty-nester school.

And is this woman the girl he dumped back in high school in order to date his future wife?

Fate sure is ironic when it comes to love.

_____

PHOTO: I drove a Ryder truck when my wife and I, empty-nesters at last, moved out of our townhome . . . and promptly moved into my in-laws’ house. Maybe my life is a logline.