Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: fiction writing (Page 2 of 3)

All That You Can’t Leave Behind: On Memories, Memorabilia, and Minimalism

April 30, 2019 / / 22 Comments

A lifelong packrat, here’s the story of my unlikely conversion to minimalism.

Concert tickets.  Refrigerator magnets.  Christmas ornaments.  Comic books.  Trading cards.  Greeting cards.  Bobbleheads.  Bank statements.  Photo albums.  Vinyl records.  Shoes.  Shot glasses.  Jewelry.  Blu-rays.

What does the stuff we collect, consciously or unconsciously, contribute to the story of our lives?

And… what does it mean for us when there’s less of it?

Photo credit: Ticketmaster blog, June 26, 2015

In an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times earlier this month, columnist Peter Funt laments the obsolescence of analog mementoes in a Digital Age:

And so ticket stubs join theater playbills, picture postcards, handwritten letters and framed photos as fading forms of preserving our memories.  It raises the question, Is our view of the past, of our own personal history, somehow different without hard copies?

Peter Funt, “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?,” Opinion, New York Times, April 5, 2019

In recent years, I’ve expanded this blog from its initial scope, an exclusively academic forum on storytelling craft, to chronicle my own personal history, often in no particular order.  I am ever and always in search of a clearer, more complete, more honest perspective on my past, and how it has shaped the narrative arc of my life; I mine my memories regularly for content, and for truth.

I have also routinely expressed apprehension about the practices we’ve lost in a Digital Age, the kind to which Mr. Funt refers, particularly as that applies to the corrupted discipline of storytelling itself:  From the superhero crossovers of the “Arrowverse,” to the literary Easter-egg hunt of Castle Rock, to the expansive franchising of Star Wars, today’s popular entertainments are less concerned with saying something meaningful about the human condition than they are with challenging the viewer to catch all their internal cross-references.  Whereas stories once rewarded audiences with insight, now the reward is the esteemed privilege of calling oneself a superfan—a participatory designation earned by following all the breadcrumbs and connecting all the dots… an assignment only achievable if one never misses a new installment:

In a nod to the subscription model of consumption—where we lease cars or pay monthly to a music service—the extended narratives of prestige TV series spread out their climaxes over several years rather than building to a single, motion picture explosion at the end.  But this means energizing the audience and online fan base with puzzles and “spoilers”. . . .

. . . The superfan of commercial entertainment gets rewarded for going to all the associated websites and fan forums, and reading all the official novels.  Superfans know all the answers because they have purchased all the products in the franchise.  Like one of those card games where you keep buying new, expensive packs in order to assemble a powerful team of monsters, all it takes to master a TV show is work and money.

Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 163

Fanboys and -girls thought they were legitimized when the geek subculture went mainstream—when superheroes and sci-fi went from niche hobby to pop-cultural monopoly—but they were really just commodified:  “geek” shifted from a stigmatized social category to a lucrative economic one.  Leveraging our telecommunications-induced FOMO, a new permutation of commercial narrative was contrived:  the “mega-franchise,” which seeks not our intermittent audience, but rather our habitual obedience.  Sure, you may not have even liked the last four Star Wars or Terminator or Transformers movies… but do you really wanna run the risk of skipping this one?

More is more: Every “Star Wars” character has its own backstory and action figure—collect them all!

So, given those two ongoing preoccupations—personal history and receding traditions in the Digital Age—the thesis of “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?” would’ve spoken to me regardless, but the timing of it was nonetheless uncanny, as I have devoted no small degree of consideration in recent months to the matter of the physical objects we amass, wittingly or otherwise, and how they tether us to the past.  Here’s the story.

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“Almost” Doesn’t Count: On Trying and Losing (Repeat as Needed)

November 28, 2018 / / 26 Comments

In the event you don’t keep track of these things, the Los Angeles Dodgers lost the World Series last month, four games to one, to the Boston Red Sox.  It was both the Dodgers’ second consecutive World Series appearance and defeat.  From the point of view of many a long-suffering fan here in L.A., collapsing yet again mere inches from the finish line amounts to nothing more than another season-long strikeout, a yearlong exercise in futility, a squandered investment of time and emotional support.  “This is where baseball breaks your heart,” someone said to me in the waning days of the season.  To be sure, I share the sentiment:  It’s hard as hell to get so frustratingly close to the Golden Ring only to go home empty-handed.  A miss is as good as a mile, after all.  Close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades.  “Almost” doesn’t count.

As recently as a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known, much less cared, who won or lost this Series—or even who played in it.  I came to baseball relatively late in life—around forty—as I recounted in “Spring Fever,” the gist of which was this:  For whatever reason, neither I nor any of my boyhood pals were born with the “sports gene.”  We were all pop-culture fanatics, more likely to be found at the local comic shop than Little League field.  When we saw the Bronx Bombers play the Indians at Yankee Stadium in 1986, none of us knew what the hell to make of that abstract experience; when we watched them face-off again in David S. Ward’s Major League in 1989, in the context of a Cinderella narrative, suddenly the rivalry had meaning.  We loved movies and comics; sports we simply had no use for.

A few years later, I found myself formally studying comics (under legendary Batman artist and DC Comics editor Carmine Infantino) and cinema (in college) in preparation for making a career in those fields.  What they don’t tell you in school, though, is that when you turn your passions into your profession, you often do so at the expense of the joy you once took in those pastimes.  Worse still, so many of the things that directly inspired me to be a screenwriter, from Star Wars to superheroes, I eventually grew to disdain.  And what Dodgers baseball restored in me, outside my conscious awareness as it was happening, was the innocent pleasure of being a fan of something again; it’s been a welcome, even analeptic, reprieve from the tyranny of passion.

Game 2 of the 2018 World Series

The Dodgers’ reentry into the World Series this fall, and the collective hope it kindled of their first world-championship win in precisely three decades, coincided with a sobering anniversary of my own:  It’s been exactly twenty years—October of 1998—since I signed with my first literary manager off a screenplay I’d written called BONE ORCHARD.  It occurs to me only now, as I type this, that the project was something of a creative precursor to Escape from Rikers Island, trafficking in many of the same themes and concepts:  an urban island left to rot and ruin, overrun with supernatural savages (demons, not zombies), with a neo–hardboiled detective at the center of the action.  (I’d studied Raymond Chandler in college and have since been heavily influenced by his fiction.)

Anyway, there I was, twenty-two years old and only a few months out of school, and everything was unfolding right on schedule.  The script would be taken to the spec marketplace and I would soon join the ranks of working screenwriters.  You study for a career in the arts, and you get one—simple as that.

Christ, if only.  BONE ORCHARD didn’t sell.  And while I was halfway through writing my follow-up, the management company repping me shuttered.  Young and naïve though I was, I nonetheless intuited I wasn’t likely to move the needle on my screenwriting career in New York—an ambition I was resolute about fulfilling—so I left the comforts of home behind for Los Angeles.

When you first arrive in Hollywood, good luck getting anyone with even a modicum of clout to give you the time of day.  Not gonna happen.  What you do—and what I did—is seek out aspiring filmmakers at the same level and pool resources.  In addition to screenwriting, I’d had experience as a film and video editor, so I started cutting USC thesis shorts pro bono.  Within a year or two, I’d established a circle of friends and colleagues, all in our twenties, who were collaborating on “portfolio projects.”  I was editing by day and writing by night, hoping to network my way to new representation—an objective that would, to my slowly percolating astonishment, take another half-dozen years to realize.

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Dreaming Dreams and Seeing Apparitions: On Writing Horror and Fighting Climate Change

October 30, 2018 / / 26 Comments

It certainly occurred to me, ahead of last month’s post, that the blog’s left turn into environmentalism might’ve whiplashed those expecting the customary deep dive into craft or culture.  As part of our training as Climate Reality Leaders, we’re asked to reflect on our personal climate stories—the origins of our interest in the movement—something I’ve invested no small amount of time doing this past month.  To that end, it dawned on me that the very same formative circumstances inspired both my passion for horror fiction and climate activism; they are not unrelated callings but very much part and parcel.

It was at the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers, my old stomping ground, where many of my first boyhood adventures were undertaken.  My friends and I would scale the towering steel foundational girders of the Henry Hudson Bridge as high as we could climb.  We’d cross Spuyten Duyvil Creek by way of the century-old railroad swing bridge to explore the Indian caves in the vast, lush expanse of Inwood Hill Park at the northernmost tip of Manhattan.  (Incidentally, those caves feature prominently in the 2003 historical fantasy Forever, Pete Hamill’s centuries-spanning ode to Gotham.  Great novel.)

On weekends, my parents would drive us up the Hudson Valley—to Sleepy Hollow or Nyack or Bear Mountain—which was a particularly spellbinding delight this time of year.  It’s a truly magical region that in many respects looks just the same as it did to the Dutch explorers who first arrived in the early seventeenth century—and, more to the point, the Lenape Indians who called the valley their home for a dozen millennia before that.  For the conservation of this land, you can thank—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—J. P. Morgan.

And not just him—George Walbridge Perkins and John D. Rockefeller, too.  Owed in part to the efforts of these forward-thinking businessmen-philanthropists at the turn of the twentieth century, much of the woodlands on the banks of the Hudson was spared from development, as were the Palisades, the magnificent cliffs along the west side of the river.  Consider it:  These capitalists preserved the natural harmony of the Lower Hudson Valley from the ravages of capitalism itself; on account of their preemptive actions, much of it remains to this day virgin forest to be (re)discovered by successive generations.

The woodlands just blocks from where I grew up in the Bronx (photo credit: Sean Carlin, 29 December 2012)

As a writer of supernatural fiction who continues to draw inspiration from this region—virtually all my stories are set there—I walk in the footsteps of literary giants.  Two of the first American authors—horror authors, no less—lived in the area and wrote about it:  Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe.  Savor the way Irving lets this “region of shadows,” pregnant with manes, cast a spell over his receptive imagination in the Halloween classic “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: Continue reading

The Cat in the Sprawl: Blake Snyder’s Genres and Postnarrative Fiction

July 23, 2018 / / 23 Comments

The industry-standard storytelling program Save the Cat!, developed by late screenwriter Blake Snyder, provides two chief implements for writers of fiction.

The first is the “beat sheet,” which is just Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey by another (more user-friendly, less academically dense) set of names:  “Crossing the First Threshold” is renamed “Break into Two”; “Tests, Allies, Enemies” becomes “Fun and Games”; “Approach to the Inmost Cave” is simplified as “Midpoint”; and so forth.  The beat sheet offers an easy-to-use mythic blueprint for outlining a narrative.

Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” or monomyth

The second tool, which is really Snyder’s principal innovation, are his genre classifications—the ten different narrative variations on the hero’s journey, each with its own central dramatic question and particular set of story conventions:  Monster in the House is about a killer in a confined setting (Jaws, Halloween, Fatal Attraction); Dude with a Problem depicts an innocent hero thrust suddenly into a life-or-death battle (Die Hard, The Martian, Home Alone); Golden Fleece stories are about a quest undertaken for a defined and/or tangible prize (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ocean’s Eleven, Stand by Me), etc.

The beat sheet offers the writer a universal macrostructural narrative foundation; the genre categories prescribe the requirements/expectations germane to each of the ten subtypes of story models.  The most successful narratives are recognizable as a single genre only, whereas some of the biggest bombs and/or creative failures of recent memory (47 Ronin, Winter’s Tale, The Mountain Between Us) mixed and matched tropes from multiple genres, leaving the audience bewildered and disoriented.

Of course, the hero’s journey/beat sheet doesn’t apply to fiction in the new “postnarrative” mode of our hyperlinked Digital Age, which “is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now, [New York:  Penguin Group, 2013], 34).  So, given that, do Snyder’s genre types, then, have any relevance for nonlinear, open-ended “rabbit-hole” fiction—like Lost, Mr. Robot, This Is Us, and Westworld—for which “an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point” (ibid.)?

In a previous post titled “Saving the Cat from Itself,” I argued that postnarrativity, as a form, hadn’t yet been codified—merely identified—and therefore it would be a mistake to impose Snyder’s templates on series like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.  Beyond that, I haven’t much explored the matter, let alone settled it.

In today’s guest post, longtime friend of the blog Dave Lerner, a.k.a. dellstories, takes on the issue of whether the genre classifications of Save the Cat! have any applicability to postnarrativity.  Feel free to post follow-up questions for Dave in the comments section below, and kindly pay a visit to his Patreon page.  Take it away, Dave!

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Changing the Narrative: Why Some of Our Most Popular Stories Affirm Our Most Pernicious Beliefs—and How Storytellers Can Rewrite This Bad Script

June 25, 2018 / / 55 Comments

I can’t say it was by deliberate design, but the blog this year has been heavily focused on the power of storytelling as a cultural lodestar, one that reflects the changing times as much as it influences them.  Like gravity, or capitalism, narrative is a governing force in our lives that mostly operates invisibly, if for no other reason than we’ve gotten so accustomed to its ubiquity.

“As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations.  Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we lace those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives.  Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time.  That’s one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now, [New York:  Penguin Group, 2013], 16).

Taking those values “into our dreams,” as Rushkoff puts it, is a crucial proviso, because it underscores the subconscious way storytelling works:  A good story seduces you with the promise of entertainment, incrementally winds you up into a state of suspense, and only lets you out when it’s made its point—when it’s imparted its takeaway moral.  Over and over we submit to this experience, fondly recalling with friends the parts of a story that made us jump, or laugh, or cry, but seldom do we give much consideration to its underlying ethos; that sort of subtextual scrutiny, let’s face it, begins and ends in third-period English.

But if fiction is the means by which our mores and traditions are conferred, then it is also, accordingly, the way in which bad ideas are inculcated, even by trustworthy artists.  Much of this is owed, quite innocently, to utilitarian narrative patterns that have, through mass-repetition, developed into accepted sociocultural precepts.

You all know the rules: sin equals death

Genre conventions are part of a pact storytellers make with their audience, a set of tacitly agreed-upon expectations:  an action thriller will have violence; a slasher film will feature teenage sex; a romantic comedy will pair ideologically (and adorably) mismatched lovers.  The best stories find a way of at once honoring and challenging those tropes (Scream, The Dark Knight); most, however, simply take them as an uncontested given.  Commenting on the erotica blockbuster Fifty Shades Freed, comedian Bill Maher noted:

“Psychologists have to explain how in the age of #MeToo, the number-one movie in America is about a woman on a leash.  Or, how in romantic comedies, there are only three plots:  she married her boss; stalking is romantic; and ‘I hate you and then I love you’” (Bill Maher, “New Rule:  Hollywood’s Grey Area,” Real Time with Bill Maher, February 16, 2018).

To a certain extent, given their sheer volume, archetypal scenarios are unavoidable.  And most writers, I suspect, don’t promulgate them with an actively malignant agenda:  I don’t imagine screenwriter J. F. Lawton, for instance, set out to make the case that prostitution is romantic when he conceived the neo-Pygmalion fairy tale Pretty Woman; that was simply an incidental if unfortunate concomitant.  Artists, after all, have consumed thousands of stories, too, and are therefore as susceptible to the subliminal indoctrination of culturally ingrained—and narratively reinforced—worldviews as the rest of us.  Some of our most cherished American myths even help to explain how we’ve arrived at this dangerous moment in history.

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A Couple of Gen Xers Talk Movies, Screenwriting, and Zombie Prison Breaks

April 20, 2018 / / 17 Comments

Recently, I participated in a lively Q&A over at Bookshelf Battle about nearly every pop-cultural topic imaginable:  the genesis of Escape from Rikers Island; rumors of the zombie genre’s demise; whether the hero or villain is more crucial to the conflict and meaning of a story; if, in our Era of the Endless Reboot, there are any Hollywood remakes I’d actually endorse; what aspiring screenwriters need to learn (and how they can learn it); and my exclusive, foolproof plan for breaking out of a prison full of flesh-eating undead monsters.  To paraphrase Stefon from Saturday Night Live:  This conversation has everything!

Rest assured, this only LOOKS hopeless…

I invite you to join in with your thoughts!  Feel free to leave a comment on either post—that one or this one—and I will, as always, be delighted to respond.

Please find my discussion with Bookshelf Q. Battler here.

Artistic Originality: Is It Dead—or Was It Merely a Fallacy to Begin With?

February 27, 2018 / / 58 Comments

Over the course of the many insightful conversations generated by the recent post on Star Wars:  The Last Jedi—sincerest thanks to all who shared their time and thoughts—the subject of artistic influence was discussed:  what role it played in the creation of some of Gen X’s most cherished movie franchises of yore, and what part, if any, it has in our now-institutionalized praxis of remaking those films wholesale—of “turning Hollywood into a glorified fan-fiction factory where filmmakers get to make their own versions of their childhood favorites.”

Because where is the line drawn, exactly, between inspiration and imitation?  If the narrative arts are a continuum in which every new entry owes, to a certain extent, a creative debt to a cinematic or literary antecedent, is originality even a thing?

If so, what is it, then?  How is one to construe it concretely, beyond simply “knowing it when we see it”?  And, as such, is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work?

 

THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND INFLUENCES

Since it was Star Wars that provoked those questions, let me start with this:  George Lucas is one of my eminent creative influences.  When I was in high school in the early nineties, during that long respite between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, when Star Wars was more or less placed by its creator in carbon-freezing, I became aware that the same mind had conceived two of my favorite franchises, and went to great lengths to study Lucas’ career:  how he learned the art of storytelling, where his ideas came from, how he managed to innovate the way in which blockbusters were created and marketed.

“Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” mastermind George Lucas, my first creative idol

In order to more fully appreciate what Lucas created in 1977 when he made Star Wars—a work of fiction so thrilling and inspired it seemed to emerge fully realized from his singular imagination—it behooves us to consider the varied influences he drew from.  The 1936 Flash Gordon film serial Lucas watched as a child provided the inciting animus—a grand-scale space opera told as a series of high-adventure cliffhangers.  (It also later informed the movie’s visual vocabulary, with its reliance on old-fashioned cinematic techniques like opening crawls and optical wipes.)

In a case of east meets west, Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces provided a general mythic and archetypal blueprint to endow Lucas’ sprawling alien-world fantasy with psychological familiarity, while Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress served as a direct model for the plot he eventually settled on (after at least three start-from-scratch rewrites).  Lucas ultimately patterned the series’ three-part narrative arc after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle (which later directly influenced his high-fantasy franchise-nonstarter Willow), because, prior to Star Wars, closed-ended “trilogies” weren’t really a thing in commercial cinema.

In addition to his cinematic and literary interests, Lucas is also a passionate scholar of world history (as evidenced by Indiana Jones, particularly the television series), and a direct line can be drawn from the X-wing assault on the Death Star to the aerial dogfights of World War II, to say nothing of the saga’s allusions to the Roman Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War.  As for where the Force and lightsabers and the twin suns of Tatooine came from… who knows?  The sheer number of disparate interests that met, mated, and reproduced within the confines of Lucas’ brain can never be fully accounted for, even by the man himself.

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Writers Groups—the Pros and Cons

November 28, 2017 / / 19 Comments

From 2010 through 2014, I participated as one of the founding members of a writers group that met every other Tuesday at restaurants around Hollywood to trade script notes and war stories.  There were eight of us in total, all with representation, though none had yet experienced what they would’ve defined as their “big break.”  We had genre screenwriters (including yours truly), drama and sitcom scribes, and even a comedic playwright, of different genders, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds.  Everyone brought a distinct skill set and perspective to the table.

That was nothing if not an interesting time to be a screenwriter in Hollywood.  The disastrous 2007–08 Writers Guild strike left the once-robust spec marketplace decimated, bringing about permanent systemic changes to the industry:  Studios were no longer—with very rare exception—buying and developing original materials any longer, opting instead to aggressively franchise their vast libraries of branded IPs (hence the endless Star Wars and superhero movies retarding our culture at present), and since those jobs only go to screenwriting’s top one percent, the lion’s share of screenwriters out there could neither find work nor make sales.

While screenwriters picketed, the studios cleaned house

But in 2010, the full impact of that paradigm shift hadn’t yet made itself undeniably evident, so everyone—screenwriters, agents, managers—were still operating, however futilely, under the old model, in which spec scripts were churned out by writers under the developmental “guidance” (read:  marching orders) of their management, then shopped by agents lured out of hiding only by the dangling carrot of their 10% cut.  “Spec’ing” is a demoralizing practice in the best of times, and those were hardly the best of times.

But our writers group was a tremendous source of comfort and counsel to me during that period.  It was a regular opportunity to get out of the house for a night out, to socialize with folks who understood the particular anxieties, frustrations, and exhilarations of attempting to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood.  It made the town a far less lonely place.  All of us, not just me, looked forward to those Tuesday evenings.  But more on why they eventually reached their end shortly.

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Richard Matheson: The Man Behind the Famed Author

June 15, 2017 / / 39 Comments

Writing is a necessarily solitary occupation in virtually all of its stages:  studying craft, breaking stories, producing drafts, editing manuscripts—each of these tasks consigns us to endless hours in the privacy of our own imaginations.  Opportunities to bond with colleagues, a given in nearly any other profession, are often few and far between for us.

Likewise, reading is a conscious act of seclusion, as well—one in which we submit to the imagination of an author.  We often (usually) have no relationship with these artists outside the forum of their fiction itself, despite the profound sense of intimacy engendered through their creations, which have the capacity—and we’ve all experienced this, regardless of the extent of our own personal creative inclinations—to shape our very apprehension of reality.

In our many discussions of storytelling craft here on this blog, and our ongoing appreciation of some of the masters of the discipline, I haven’t yet addressed the subject of relationships—either direct working associations, or the kind of indirect (yet no less meaningful) familiarity fostered with the artists we revere through their stories.  Today I’d like to share a special instance in which those two roads intersected, and from it developed the rarest of all affiliations:  friendship.

After featuring my first interview here last month, I am pleased to host the blog’s first guest post.  Barry Hoffman works with Gauntlet Press, a specialty press devoted to publishing signed limited-edition collectibles and trade paperbacks; in the essay that follows, he discusses the influential fiction of legendary horror/science-fiction author Richard Matheson, and shares personal insights from his experiences as Matheson’s admirer, publisher, and friend:

 

Richard Matheson passed away June 23, 2013.  Many might not recall his name, but you know his work.  Matheson wrote twenty-two scripts for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, including what many consider the most famous, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which starred William Shatner as a crazed airplane passenger who sees a monster on the wing of the plane.  He wrote scripts for the two acclaimed Kolchak movies of the week (he was not involved with the inferior series).  His most famous novel was I Am Legend, which most recently was a film starring Will Smith (the movie, though, doesn’t adhere to Matheson’s original script or novel).

Richard Matheson’s seminal vampire novel has inspired no fewer than three very successful feature-film adaptations, starring legends-in-their-own-right Vincent Price, Charlton Heston, and Will Smith in the title role

He penned What Dreams May Come, which was also turned into a film.  Both the film and the novel were of great comfort to the families of victims of the Columbine school massacre in 1999.  He also wrote The Shrinking Man and penned the script for what became The Incredible Shrinking Man.  Matheson didn’t achieve the name recognition of Stephen King because he jumped from genre to genre.  He wrote two acclaimed horror novels (I Am Legend and Hell House), five westerns, a war novel (Beardless Warriors), science fiction (Earthbound), several thrillers, and novels like What Dreams May Come that defy categorization.  He wrote well over a hundred short stories but abandoned the form as his short fiction couldn’t feed his family.  He was a true Renaissance man who also wrote music (unpublished).

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Foundations of Storytelling, Part 1: The Logline

March 23, 2017 / / 57 Comments

This is the first post in an occasional series.

With the Second World War looming, a daring archaeologist-adventurer is tasked by the U.S. government to find the Ark of the Covenant—a Biblical artifact of invincible power, lost for millennia in the desert sands of Egypt—before it can be acquired by the Nazis.

On Christmas Eve, an off-duty police officer is inadvertently ensnared in a life-or-death game of cat-and-mouse in an L.A. skyscraper when his wife’s office party is taken hostage by a dozen armed terrorists.

Over the Fourth of July holiday, a resort-island sheriff finds himself in deep water—literally—when his beach is stalked by an aggressive great white shark that won’t go away.

All of the above story concepts should sound familiar—that’s why I chose them.  Yes, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, and Jaws are all popular—now classic—works of commercial cinema.  But they are also excellent exemplars of storytelling at their most basic, macrostructural levels, as demonstrated by the catchy summaries above, known in Hollywood as “the logline.”

When a single image, let alone a single sentence, imparts the essence of a story, the underlying concept is a powerful, primal one

 

THE LOGLINE AS A SELLING TOOL

The logline is a sales pitch:  In a single compact sentence, it conveys the protagonist (respectively:  the adventurous archaeologist; the off-duty cop; the beach-resort sheriff), the antagonist (the Nazis; the terrorists; the shark), the conflict and stakes (possession of the Ark for control of the world; the confined life-and-death struggle; the destruction of a man-eating leviathan), the setting (1930s Egypt; an L.A. skyscraper at Christmas; a summer resort), and the tone/genre (action/adventure; action-thriller; adventure/horror).  You can even reasonably glean the Save the Cat! category of each:

  • Raiders as Golden Fleece (Subgenre:  “Epic Fleece”)
  • Die Hard as Dude with a Problem (“Law Enforcement Problem”)
  • Jaws as Monster in the House (“Pure Monster”)

A cogent synopsis like any of the above allows a prospective buyer to “see” the creative vision for the movie, ideally triggering the three-word response every screenwriter longs to hear:  “Tell me more.”

Note what isn’t included in the logline:  The names of any of the characters.  Thematic concerns.  Emotional arcs.  Subplots.  Descriptions of particular set pieces.  That’s the “tell me more” stuff, and none of it is necessary—it is, in fact, needlessly extraneous—for the “elevator pitch,” so called for the brief window one has to hook to an exec before he steps off onto his floor (read:  loses interest).  The point of a logline is to communicate the story’s most fundamental aspects, and to capture what’s viscerally exciting about the premise.

I mean, if you’d never seen Raiders, Die Hard, or Jaws—if you knew nothing else about them other than the information contained in those loglines—you’d already have a sense of why these are, or could at least make for, gripping stories.  Pitch any one of them to a movie executive, and he can immediately envision the scenes—or at least the potential for them—suggested by the central premise.  Each one piques curiosity and, one step further, inspires the imagination.

The Raiders logline is so compelling because it takes (what was at the time) an arcane scholarly discipline, archaeology, and credibly applies it to an action-film archetype, typically the province of superspies like 007.  It also features historical elements that don’t seem like they should belong together—Nazis and Biblical relics—to envision something simultaneously smart and thrilling.

The Die Hard and Jaws loglines are exciting because they take their police-officer protagonists and essentially reduce them to “everyman” status (unlike Raiders, which features a specialist as its hero) by putting them in overwhelmingly harrowing situations that play to some of our most primal fears:  terrorism and sharks.  In short, they have that compelling What if? factor.

That’s how those stories got sold, and how the movies themselves got made.  We don’t need any information beyond what we get in those loglines to want to see the finished product.  As such, condensing a story to its logline is an absolutely essential skill for any screenwriter.

Let me amend that:  It is an essential skill for all storytellers, novelists included—perhaps especially.  And its applications are far broader than simply marketing.

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