One crafty writer’s never-say-die quest to tell a story for the page or screen.

DIE TRYING is a work in progress.

Watch me tickle, in real time, the fat bottom of a garish rooster that never crows.

I’m attempting to sell a screenplay. If that fails, I’ll publish it as a novel. If that fails, I’ll document why.

And it will soar. No grim failure porn here.

This isn’t motivation, “branding” advice or Hollywood mythmaking. It’s a candid record of submissions, silence, false momentum, real momentum and the head toll of trying to make something exist in a market designed to ignore you.

If you write, read scripts professionally or are trying to understand how stories actually move through the system, this is for you.

If not, it probably isn’t.

Failure hits hard when you’re burrowed in bed, freezing.

I live in balmy Southwest Florida where it averages 78° year-round.

But last Thursday night, a polar vortex pushed a cold front in. 

I nested in my bed sheets, as I tried resurrecting the logline for my current script GOING PERM. Balancing a composition notebook on my knees, pen in hand, I stared at the page, buffering, and realized I was terrible at this aspect of screenwriting.

Why the struggle?

I just procrastinated on writing this. Jumped over to The Gram. Saw a post from @thequantumbrief that described a genius physicist whose website listed her as deputy director of a collaboration on celestial holography.

My script is vast with multiple storylines, themes and characters, both major and minor. Compressing this broad canvas of a cosmos into one sentence is difficult.

It invites failure.

I have a screenwriter launch service reaching out to Hollywood executives. Throwing them the logline or one-sentence summary of your story. If they like it, they’ll read the script.

Almost all of them haven’t bitten.

Now it’s time for you to judge and deliver your verdict on whether the Christmas wrapping on the gift makes it fit to open.

DO JUDGE ME

I know the advice. Don’t try and cram everything into one sentence.

Here’s version #1 that I revised from a Blacklist logline of my script:

“In the near future, where immigrants are forced to use temporary

identification cards that operate on 24-hour installments, an assassin must complete one last hit to go perm and escape with the woman he loves.”

This version mentions the future society where citizenry is permanent or temp with limited rights. It launches the high-concept aspect of the script where temps hunt for identification cards with 24-hour instalments. We nail the hitman’s goal of one last hit and his love interest.

Wow… a lot. Cut it down.

Version #2:

Logline: In the near-future U.S. Southeastern District, where temporary and permanent occupants collide, a temp assassin, living on 24-hour installments, must complete one last hit to go perm.

The Southeast region is way too specific for a summary. The sentence doesn’t flow well. The protagonist and his goal are buried towards the end of the sentence.

Two more variants that I worked on in bed last Thursday:

“In the blistering near future, how does a hitman with a habit go perm in an impermanent world?

In the near future, a disillusioned temp hitman must assassinate a bulletproof politician in a world where permanent residents lord over temporary grunts.”

I am working with the screenwriter service Roadmap Writers to market GOING PERM. The CEO liked the second. The first — too abstract.

In all these different versions, I never mention the quantum computing backdrop in the script. In the last two, I never mention the love interest.

So much left on the cutting room floor.

I realized loglines are like writing an email subject line which descends from writing a headline of a news article or blog post.

Get people to move on and read the damn thing.

Build intrigue. Build the itch. Compel the scratch.

More marketing gimmick. Less beat-by-beat story encapsulation in big verbosity.

With a nod to PhysicsGirl, was I able to visualize an eternal quantum universe in one sentence?

No.

I think what I have now is still uninteresting.

Back to the drawing board.

THIS WEEK IN DIE TRYING

• Day jobs started: 1
  

• Time spent writing scripts: 0 hours
  

• Reads requested: 1 (producer, indie)

• Mood: “Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.”—Luis Buñuel

If you’re reading this because you write, read, develop or sell scripts:

What am I missing right now about loglines?

Hit reply. I read every response.

—Michael