Writing is Hard: Constructing a logline.

Image hijacked from Ancestry.com.

In the 17th century, a log-line was the way ships measured their speed. It's also where the nautical term "knots" comes from, but that's not what I'm talking about right now. I just thought that was cool.

The logline I'm talking about is the writing term: a brief synopsis of the story that summarizes the main character and the story's hook. According to Wikipedia, it started as a labeling system for Hollywood studios to easily identify and remember what scripts were about, but developed into a pitching tool. Not only for people pitching projects to producers, but also for pitching completed products to audiences - like the blurbs in TV Guide or DVR descriptions.

I don't know how much the term is used in the publishing industry, but the concept is certainly there. Writing a great pitch or query letter is a vital skill for writers, though one that a lot of new writers admit to having a problem with. How do you condense a novel or comic series into a one-sentence summary?

There's a really useful article on Scriptshadow that explains how to do just that. The boiled down version is this: "A good logline...gives us the main character, the main character’s goal, and the central conflict in the story (what’s preventing them from getting that goal)." There's a lot more to it than that and writer Carson Reeves makes it simple, including examples from famous movies. If you're a writer and unsure about how to hook an editor or agent with a pitch, it's important reading.

Come to think of it, it's good to have a logline even if you've self-published and are trying to sell your stuff online or at conventions. In the business world, it's called the Elevator Pitch: how you would describe your product to someone in the few seconds of time you have traveling with them in the elevator. I've been to a lot of conventions, traveled a lot of Artist Alleys, and heard a lot of sales pitches from independent comics creators. Most of them would have benefited by a strong logline.

It's also useful long before you get to the sales stage of your product. It's great for making sure you've constructed a good story in the first place. If you don't have a main character with goals and something that's preventing her from achieving those goals, you really don't have a story at all.

I am apparently a Master of Many Styles

According to I Write Like, when reviewing Annie...

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

This concerned me until I learned then when composing updates on my writing and reviewing Camouflage...

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

And when reviewing Atlantis: The Lost Empire...

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

And when reviewing The Legend of Boggy Creek...

I write like
George Orwell

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

So obviously this is an extremely sophisticated and accurate tool.

Quotes of the Week: One Big-Toothed Cat Short

I laughed when the article said Skaar's adventures will include meeting up with prominent Savage Land character including Ka-Zar and Shanna, as I think that's pretty much one big-toothed cat short of all the prominent Savage Land characters.
--Tom Spurgeon

Everyone in Hollywood knows how important it is that a film is a brand before it hit theaters. If a brand has been around, Harry Potter for example, or Spider-Man, you are light years ahead. And there lies the problem. Because unfortunately these franchises are become more ridiculous. Battleship. This degrades the cinema.
--James Cameron

In creating a movie or a book or a comic, it’s not a mathematical equation. 2 plus 2 doesn’t always equal 4. It can equal 0 or a hundred. There is no way of completely duplicating the success of something you’ve seen. So much relies on instinct, voodoo, luck and, the main thing, the talent and vision of the people involved.
--Axel Alonso

Writing is Hard: Bad Writing and Great Moments

Bad Writing



It's only in five theaters nationwide, so most of us will have to wait for Netflix, but this documentary looks fairly fascinating. It's about a bad poet who interviews renowned writers about the craft and how to improve.



8 Moments You Absolutely Need to Deliver to Your Readers

Larry Brooks has an excellent post on how moments in a story have to work together to support the Big Picture in order for a story to satisfy its readers. If you've spent any time studying the craft of writing, some of them will be familiar, but Brooks even talks about those in ways that I hadn't considered before. I especially like how he describes the ultimate goal of any storyteller: for readers to get "that feeling of loss when the book is done." I'm bookmarking this one to refer to later as I keep thinking about it.

Converging worlds

Jennifer de Guzman writes about how decompartmentalized writers lives have become thanks to social networking. I think this is a good - though sometimes scary - thing. I'm not saying that it works this way for everyone, but it's certainly helped my self-perception as a writer to have my creative life mingling with other aspects of who I am.

Writing is Hard: Character Actors

John Rozum has a cool post on "casting" his characters in his head before he writes them. Referring specifically to Adam and Julia Kadmon from Midnight, Mass. he talks about how imagining a specific actor in the role can not only help communicate ideas to comic book artists, but can also help solidify the character in your head as you're writing:

When I got to thinking about Midnight, Mass. again shortly before it finally became a reality I had an epiphany of Julia being Famke Janssen which really brought together all of the loose threads and ideas I had for the series and definitely cemented the character of Julia for me.

I've done this a couple of times and it was very helpful. I need to do it more.

Writing is Hard: Marketing 101

RM Rhodes is a comics creator who's married to a marketing manager. He talks about what he's learned from her in this very helpful post.

In addition to advice on bare-minimums like having a decent website (Facebook doesn't count), business cards, and an elevator pitch, he also talks about how to be memorable at conventions. And he touches on the topic of making sure you're memorable in an way that reflects your work. Rhodes wears a purple suit to conventions and that helps him stand out from other creators who are usually dressed in what he calls "hipster business casual," but he admits that "nobody knows much about the content that I produce – they just know the suit." I'll look forward to reading his thoughts as he continues to figure that out.

John Rozum on Developing Characters

John Rozum has a helpful post outlining his approach to creating meaningful characters. It's an excellent starting point for beginning writers and a great reminder of what even veteran writers should be thinking about when putting a story together.

Quotes of the Week: Someone Else's Characters

I had a great phone conversation with [Harlan Ellison] while I was writing THE X-FILES comic book series in which he expressed his extreme disappointment in the work I was doing there. Everything he said was right on the money and tied in to the usual restrictions that come with playing with someone else's licensed characters, especially when those characters are on what is currently the hottest tv show on. There's not much you are allowed to do with such a property, and my hands were tied. Again, upon hearing this he was equally as supportive as any other time I've talked to him. I didn't find his dismissal of my work on the X-Files to be a nasty rant, but simply the opinion of someone who was disappointed because they knew I could have been doing so much better. And he was right.
--John Rozum

I like being Politically Correct. If I'm saying something that is offensive, even unintentionally, then I want to be alerted. I don't, as a rule, blame the offended party for being offended. Yes, I know this PC stuff can go too far. But I don't want to get into that with this post. Mainly, I worry about PC just for the sake of staying aware. I like having a clue. I think PC protocols should often be broken, but I want to do it intentionally, with thought and for a particular purpose. I don't, generally speaking, want to be a jackass.
--Richard Beck

Quote of the Week: Writing at Home

I think the thing people idealize most about freelancing is what they would like the least: the idea of working at home. Every single interview with Periscope Studio, our members are asked, "Why did you recreate an office situation?" Like we're insane. Everyone pictures themselves in a massive study with tall windows looking out on the forest or the cliffs over the water. But usually you're in an attic or moldy basement, somewhere by the washer and dryer. Getting office space is great if you can make it happen, I promise.
--Jeff Parker.

Writing is Hard: How Not to Write

This week's been threatening to get away from me since it started and yesterday it finally did. So there'll be a couple of more posts than usual today to make up for it.

How Not to Write About Africa



As a guy who loves jungle stories, but is sensitive to the racism in many of that genre's tropes, I found this article extremely helpful.

How Not to Write the Blurb for a Fantasy Novel



Maybe this is just me, so tell me in the comments if it bugs you too, but there's something that'll turn me off a fantasy novel every single time, even when the cover is as gorgeous as this one by Dan Dos Santos. From the Amazon Product Description for The Questing Road: "Acolytes to a dark god have crossed the gulf between worlds to abduct an innocent tariling..."

The italics are in the description, but they also highlight the word that stopped me cold. I've got no idea what a "tariling" is and I hate having to read the rest of the blurb to find out. Reading a blurb should be about discovering if I want to buy a book, not solving a mystery. In this case, I gather that a tariling is a cat-like creature (though the blurb likes the word "felinoid"). Couldn't it have just said that right up front?

I guess there must be an audience that enjoys being plunged cold into a world where everything has to be deciphered from the get-go, but I'm not part of it. I appreciate a fully realized world with its own languages and cultures and creatures to discover, but I prefer to be introduced to the strangeness gradually, not playing catch up from the first page. Or the cover blurb.

Writing is Hard: When to Do What

Pimp My Novel is a great blog about the publishing business from a Sales perspective. Recently, blogger Eric re-ran a post about what you can do to sell your book, and more importantly, when you should do what. It's not only informative, but as you read through his timeline it's also fun to imagine all those book deals and promotional tours you're going to get once you sit your butt down and finish the dang novel.

Elsewhere... CrossGen returned

Here's what else I've been up to online:

The Return of CrossGen?



Inspired by the Comic-Con news that Marvel's planning to do "some CrossGen stuff" now that they access to the properties Disney bought when CrossGen went belly-up, Tim O'Shea and I came up with a list of six CrossGen series we'd like to see make a comeback. I was a huge CrossGen fan back in the day, so knowing that it could be resurrected in some form is all the reason I need to appreciate Disney's buying Marvel.

What Are You Reading?



Short reviews of Super Maxi-Pad Girl #3 and a serial killer mystery called The Awakening.

The Royal Historian of Oz and Fanfic



In this week's Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs, we tackle the age-old problem of creator-owned work vs. corporate-owned (or public domain, as the case may be). Which should you read? Which should you create? And what does the concept of Official Canon have to do with it?

Writing is Hard: Self-Publishing Ebooks and Feeding Your Family Too

Writer JA Konrath has been championing the advantages of self-publishing your own ebooks for a while now, having raked in a ton of money himself that way. Because I'm interested in the publishing industry and where it's headed, I've been following his posts with a lot of curiosity. I just haven't linked to them because I don't have a novel I'm trying to get published or any other dog in this particular hunt. Not yet anyway.

But I'd like to one day and I figure that I'm going to want to remember his detailed advice on How to Make Money on Ebooks.