NaNo Goal Today: 2,000 words
NaNo Total Goal: 8,644
Actual Words Today: 2,103
Total Words To Date: 8,747
I know, I know. Not many writers usually like to write loglines, summaries, treatments, or synopses. However, I firmly believe that writing these things will help you focus your story. Once when I was struggling with a screenplay, I just stopped and wrote the logline over and over again until it clicked. My story literally gelled at that moment and I knew what to do.
Loglines are the hardest. They are basically one or two sentence summaries of a story. One thing that can really help in creating a logline is to think in terms of Who must do what before /or else this happens. It’s important to know the stakes. Once you’ve figured this out, you know where to point your story.
Here’s mine for Intergalactic:
IdoLL, a fading 17-year-old intergalactic pop star, inadvertently starts an interplanetary war when the princess of one planet stows away on her tour ship. She must get the princess home and set things right before her musical career ends up in the toilet.
I extended it and wrote this summary:
When 17-year-old fading intergalactic pop star idoLL starts her 12-planet tour, her biggest worries are that rising star Jettison Prix has overtaken her on the T.R.E.N.D. charts and that her manager has booked her some lame gigs. But when Princess Tarantella of the planet Rethula stows away on her tour ship, she finds herself stranded in the middle of an interplanetary war without her bandmates: Monkey, the cultural liaison and synth robot, and Debop, the enigmatic alien percussion wiz. Lost without her crew, the high-maintenance diva must come down a notch in order to save the princess, stop the war, and track down her scumbag manager who has disappeared with all her money.
~ ~ ~
Don’t get too nervous about these. They are not set in stone. I often find myself refining my loglines and summaries months after I’ve written the work when I start to pitch the projects. They are extremely useful on that end of things, too.
