A Logline a Day

This one wound up more interesting than I think I was expecting it to. I suspect part of that has to do with the way that I made magic inherently evil, fitting with the colonial New England setting. I don't know that I'd been expecting to write it that way when I started, and it's always fun when your writing surprises you. Typically it's the characters that do that, but apparently the setting is capable of it, too.

Here's the logline:
When a town falls under a dreadful curse, the local witch has to find the source of the curse before the town decides she's to blame and hangs her.

This week, Micah made exactly my choice, with Mars or Bust. I loved the idea as soon as I wrote it down, and I  loved it the entire time I was working on it. I don't know why, but I really enjoy... I don't even know what to call this genre. Imagination sci-fantasy. Like, kid books but taken the whole nine yards.

Basically, I just really enjoy the idea of a 12-year-old girl actually inventing a new type of spaceship.

Here's the logline:
When a 12-year-old girl invents a propulsion and landing system that will allow NASA to go to Mars, she refuses to sell it unless she'll be on the first ship there. 

When entire time zones start disappearing one at a time, a father who's just abandoned his family and moved across the country tries to get back to his family before their time zone disappears.

When an intern at a technology firm discovers that her boss is a vampire, she makes it her mission to slay him before her internship is up... or before he kills her.

When a 15-year-old girl's father takes her on a cross-country road trip immediately after a lengthy divorce, she has to figure out if this is really a vacation, or if it's a kidnapping. And if maybe she'd be okay with that.

After being dropped by her agent and kicked out of her apartment, a wannabe actress takes a job as a hitman, and turns out to be pretty good at it.

Yesterday's logline, To Live For, is big. Like, really big. Still technically only two sentences, but they're long ones, and at least one of them is kind of a run-on. I try to keep my loglines short; the vast majority are only two or three lines (on my screen, as things are currently formatted), but there are the occasional four-liners. I think a six-liner - like To Live For - is unprecedented, though. 

What gives? Did I just get lazy that day?

It's true, that is often the case for my longer loglines. Technically it's not laziness, but occasionally I'll have been working on a logline for half an hour, maybe 45 minutes, and I've got other things to do, so I just have to make do with one that's too long or has too much unnecessary information. 

But that's not the case for To Live For. It's just a big logline, and I can't make it any shorter without making it worse. It's not bloated. It's just big.

So what's the difference? How do I tell wh…

After shooting and killing his own son in the line of duty, a Chicago beat cop has to decide whether he was doing the right thing - and that his son was a dangerous criminal - or that his son wasn't doing anything wrong - and that he himself was.

When her best friend, boyfriend, and twin sister all die in a car accident, an accomplished high school student joins a suicide club, and goes on a camping trip with them. Though the original intent is to jump off of a cliff after a weekend of relaxation, when she finds out the relatively petty reasons some of them want to kill themselves, she tries to convince the other members of the group that they should live - without convincing herself of the same thing.

This week's theme are loglines that would probably - maybe - lead to low-budget movies. This is not an area of focus for me, so expect some fudging of the boundaries, but I'll do my best.

This treatment really supports having people other than myself picking the best loglines and treatments, because I really don't think I would've picked this logline, and I really like what it turned into. I am a bit afraid that, if not handled correctly, it could become a bit preachy, or at least navel-gazey, but the idea itself came out pretty well, I think. Thanks, Micah!

For reference, the logline is:
When something goes wrong with the first test of a ship capable of flying at relativistic speeds, the pilot returns to an Earth inhabited entirely by robots, centuries after humanity has died out.

When a young stockbroker claims she's achieved Enlightenment, her friends and family all think she's gone mad. When she starts trying to manipulate the bear market into a bull market, they're certain she has.

When a 12-year-old girl invents a propulsion and landing system that will allow NASA to go to Mars, she refuses to sell it unless she'll be on the first ship there. 

When a 13-year-old girl kills a man twice her age in a fair duel, she finds herself targeted by the man's entire family, desperate to get revenge and redeem their family's honor.

An eccentric billionaire finances a young scientific prodigy's attempt to build a time machine, on the condition that he be the first person to use it. The scientist has to unearth the billionaire's motives before she finishes the machine, lest he do something unethical or dangerous.

A middle schooler is recruited by the military to pilot a revolutionary new humanoid drone into combat, thanks to her proficiency in virtual reality games. 

When an 11-year-old wizard prodigy invents magic wands capable of enhancing a person's innate magical talent, the Sodality of Wizards tries to destroy him and his creation to stop magic from becoming something everyone has access to.

This week's theme is prodigies, or wunderkinds; people (typically, but not exclusively children) who develop skills at a level far beyond their age.

Bah. I'm not pleased with this treatment. This was the first time I really felt like I just didn't have enough time to work on it. Though that's mainly because I had to go through several iterations before I figured out how I wanted to structure it. Was the twist a surprise ending? Was that the Ordeal in the middle of the story? Maybe it actually comes pretty early? And then is the Chosen One the protagonist the entire time, or is it someone close to her? Do they become enemies?

Most of the time, I finish a treatment on Wednesday or so, and then spend Thursday and Friday polishing it, or sometimes even just ignoring it and working on other things. This time, I spent probably two, two and a half hours on Friday - as much time as the treatments normally get in a week - redoing the entire second and third acts.

So the moral of the story is, this one is not incredible, and is very unpolished. But it's posted, dagnabbit, and it's not awful, either.

The logline it's …

This week's loglines center around what I think is one of the most interesting themes to explore: what makes us human? The cult classic Blade Runner is a great example of this theme done well. A lot of these loglines are quite interesting and strong concepts, but the two that jumped out at me the most are:

The Human Element
A young doctor replaces more and more of her body with cybernetics, in an effort to become a robot. Her decreasing humanity worries her superiors, peers, and patients alike, even as it allows her to perform her job better and better.

Twice Into the Same Stream
When something goes wrong with the first test of a ship capable of flying at relativistic speeds, the pilot returns to an Earth inhabited entirely by robots, centuries after humanity has died out.

The first one better exemplifies the question of what makes us human. But the second one is, I think, a more interesting story with lots of potential. It has a bit of a Planet of the Apes thing going on, as well a…

When the population of a colony on Io slowly dies to a mysterious disease, their assistance robots are gradually forced to take on human responsibilities, roles, and even relationships.

When something goes wrong with the first test of a ship capable of flying at relativistic speeds, the pilot returns to an Earth inhabited entirely by robots, centuries after humanity has died out. 

A company hires a computer genius to develop a sophisticated AI to govern its finances. But when the AI unexpectedly starts showing signs of self-awareness - and more troublingly for the company, ethics - its creator has to fight to stop the company from destroying it.

A mechanical engineer is ordered to train a robotics engineer how to do her job, so he can build a robot to replace her. She struggles with how well to teach him, given that she'll be out of a job when he's done.

When a game programmer accidentally creates true AI for one of his games, he struggles with whether or not he should release the game, given that the game itself is capable of suffering.

Whoops! Got the date wrong for the scheduling of this, so it's showing up now instead of Saturday. You'll also note that the logline ranking still isn't up; I'll get that one up as soon as I can, too.

 ---

I don't normally think of myself as a comedic writer, so I was kind of glad that Micah picked this logline, and forced me to stretch those muscles. I think it ended up pretty funny, although who knows if that'd come through in an actual screenplay; I suspect I wouldn't be able to keep the humor up for that long, and I'd probably end up making it more of a tragicomedy or dramedy or something.

For reference, here's the logline:
A pair of empty-nesters get into black magic and witchcraft as a way to pass the time; but when they accidentally curse a neighbor to death, they have to find a way to break the curse before it can come to pass.

A young doctor replaces more and more of her body with cybernetics, in an effort to become a robot. Her decreasing humanity worries her superiors, peers, and patients alike, even as it allows her to perform her job better and better.

This week we'll be focusing on robots, but as usual, I'm going to feel free to get pretty broad with the topic. Completely digital AI, for example, or maybe even magical golems.

Something that not only interests me about writing, but also serves as a helpful tool, is the idea of writing structure is a fractal. Fractals are actually (from what I understand) pretty complicated, but the way I'll be using the term is simple: a fractal is a structure which looks the same at every level of magnification.
So what do I mean by saying writing structure is a fractal? I'm referring, of course, to our old friend the three-act structure. I know I've railed on it a little in the past, but that's more to do with how it's been used, rather than what it is.

A city girl, sent to stay with her rural grandparents, finds herself simultaneously falling for the preacher's virtuous son, and the local bad boy. As she's drawn into each of their worlds, she finds she's just as good at memorizing Bible verses as she is at selling drugs.

In a future where the only sport is a brutal wargame known as Bloodball, an ex-Bloodball champion campaigns to get safety rules added to the game.

When an ex-SEAL is accidentally killed by a drug lord, the SEAL's wife makes it her mission to get the drug lord behind bars by passively observing and the reporting crimes.

When an extraordinarily successful writer realizes his writing sucks, and is mocked by the greater writing community, he stops writing and travels around the world looking for his true calling.

A young girl, prophesied to defeat the evil wizard, is trained to fulfill her destiny. But when she kills the wizard, rather than restoring peace to the land, she decides to take power for herself - leading to massive civil war.

When a peasant's village is destroyed by an army of evil orcs, he joins the orcs in their conquest lest he be viewed as weak - and thus food.

Hello! Teddy's wife here, AKA Cassandra Robbins (because that name change is taking forever). I'm very excited to get to help Teddy with his rankings! Hopefully my rankings are helpful rather than a disgrace to that ranking process. We're about to find out! Treatment 9
Treatment 10 Treatment 11 Treatment 12

This week, the idea is going to be to take cliché plots and hopefully tweak them into something creative again. I say "hopefully" because I'm afraid I'll really just end up smooshing two clichés together to make one megacliché. We'll see what happens!

This week's concepts are pretty interesting because it's an attempt to make something that's wild and mysterious (magic) into something a little more mundane. Personally, I like this approach from things; I enjoy seeing the huge wizard battles for the fate of the universe, but I also like to take the concept of something like witches and magic to its logical counterparts: what about the janitor who gets magical powers? How does this affect everyday life?

That being said, my favorite of this week's loglines is:

Black Magic Grandma
A pair of empty-nesters get into black magic and witchcraft as a way to pass the time; but when they accidentally curse a neighbor to death, they have to find a way to break the curse before it can come to pass.

I see this as a hilarious and creative dark comedy. I say comedy because of the mundane situation: two bored, older people decide to find a hobby to kill time, and that just so happens to be the dark arts. One of the things that makes t…

I don't like consistently denigrating myself here, but I'm not crazy about this treatment. However, I'm willing to give myself a pass because it's at least as good as the last outline, and whereas the last one took me, what, six or seven weeks? This one I did in two, to kind of adjust the schedule I'm pumping these out in. So for two weeks, I think it's pretty good. Hopefully, the next one is twice as good!
Here's a link to the 3-page treatment this is based on, and here's the logline: A manned mission sent to explore the edges of the observable universe finds a primitive human colony, farther away than it should be possible for them to be. When their ship breaks down in orbit, they're forced to solve the mystery in order to return home.

I never did think of a better name. Oh well.
This one turned out short, but I think that's because it's a short movie. Or at least a simple one. I couldn't think of any ways to make it longer that weren't just meaningless padding.
I do like it, though, I like how it came out. It feels like it'd be fun to write. Probably because it was fun to write. Whatever.
The logline it's based off of: A police investigator wants to apprehend a vigilante superhero who's been cleaning up the streets, but sometimes killing people in the process.