A grieving 12 year old boy must navigate between his physical and fantasy worlds, battling fears and doubts to uncover the origins of a mysterious dagger. This journey will test the truths of who he is and who he is to become.
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A grieving 12 year old boy must navigate between his physical and fantasy worlds, battling fears and doubts to uncover the origins of a mysterious dagger. This journey will test the truths of who he is and who he is to become.
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This is a drama/fantasy scripted series if that helps.
Looking for clarification of the premise:
What is so mysterious about the dagger that it motivates the boy to undertake the quest?
What’s at stake? ?What does he stand to lose if he doesn’t go on his quest?
Who/what opposes his quest? Who/what must he defy to find the answers he is looking for?
Is there a rival who wants to possess the dagger? ?Or to phrase it another way, ?is the dagger a “McGuffin”, ?an object that all the principals want?
What is the inciting incident that starts him on his journey? ?(Even though the concept is for a series, there’s got to be an inciting incident in the pilot episode that kicks of the quest. ?And the logline ?should focus on the pilot script because if a producer is ?interested in the concept, he’ll want to see a script as a proof of concept.)
The genre is clear from the mention of a fantasy world and magical object, however the plot isn’t.
There are too many generic descriptions used and too few details described in the logline for a plot to come across clearly. In addition there is no inciting incident that clearly motivates the boy and, to boot, the goal is vague.
What starts the boy off on his journey? What motivates him to need to achieve his goal?
You mentioned that he is grieving, unless it is an unusually long term grief, that isn’t a flaw – it’s a natural and healthy state of being after a loss. What is he grieving from? You could use the death that made him grieve as his inciting incident.
Secondly, the goal needs specifying. What will he do once he uncovers the origin of the dagger? What will knowing the origin of the dagger give him? How will he use this knowledge to make things better and for whom?
The last sentence is all together redundant, as it adds nothing to the plot description, and reads more like an attempt to describe the journey as dramatic in retrospect.
Hello,
this kind of sentence sounds too vague to me ‘This journey will test the truths of who he is and who he is to become’. Too generic.
‘battling fears and doubts’ is too vague too.
And what about the dagger? This element seems too much disconnected from everything else.
I suggest to work on coherence, logic, and to be more specific about everything.
The hero’s journey and main conflict aren’t clear to me. ?Who specifically is he fighting? Why does he need to know the truth about the dagger? ?What happens if he doesn’t learn that truth?
You’ve got a journey story. ?You’ve got a world to set it in. ?You’ve even got a McGuffin for the hero to pursue. ?What’s missing is the why.
Bbass74:
Thanks for the clarifications.?However, I ?still am unable to get a handle on the concept. ?It seems to me the logline needs to focus more on specific concrete events and actions, less on psychological and existential issues.
What actually happens in the pilot?
What is the inciting incident?
Who opposes his decision to go on the quest? ?
What obstacles must he overcome in starting out? ?
What specific direction does the quest ?initially lead him?
Taken from DPG?s suggestion of basing this off the pilot alone and not the series as a whole, does change things. In the pilot, the boy finds the dagger and begins to have fantasies about where the dagger came from, he is transported to another time and place. After one of the fantasies the dagger vanishes which is the inciting incident to find the dagger.
His grief is over the loss of his older brother. Since his death he has lost his sense of identity, bravery, heroism in which his brother encouraged as they grew up together. Finding the origins of this dagger, the truth of the fantasies and the foes he faces in them entice him on this journey.
Think Wonder Years meets LOST!
Based on the pilot of the series, how about this:
“A grieving 12 year old boy must recover a lost dagger that has opened up a fantasy world in which he must journey through in the hopes of reclaiming his spirit of heroism.”
Have you considered framing the story such that ?when the boy handles the dagger, he has an intense vision of a place (say a mountain?) he’s never seen. ?No one else who handles the dagger has that vision. ?It even takes root in his dreams.
IOW: the dagger inspires/incites him to go on a vision quest. ?That, it seems to me, is ?a positive, more compelling spin than “opening up a fantasy world” as it invokes the prospect of an archetypal Hero’s Journey. ?And he is essentially going on a Hero’s Journey–isn’t he? ?And isn’t the Hero’s Journey intrinsically a call to adventure — to heroism?
?(I presume you are familiar with the paradigm of the Hero’s Journey through Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler.)
“reclaiming his spirit of heroism”. ?IMHO: ?heavy existential baggage to lay on a ?pre-adolescent. Isn’t he a too young to have developed a spirit of heroism… to even lose it… so he as to reclaim it? ?He’s only 12 years old! ?On the cusp of adolescence when his body mind and life are about to explode with new potentialities.
Seems to me what lays before him is not reclaiming heroism — but discovering it for the first time.
And discovering is forward looking. ?In contrast, recovering gives me a sense of the boy looking backward, ?a rear view of his life. ?Again, at his age, how much is there for him to see in the rear mirror view of his brief life that he needs to recover? ?
It seems to me this plot, like his life, needs to be lived looking forward.
fwiw.
Thanks DPG, some great insight. ?Actually, as 12 year old, a boy is plenty old enough to have already been exploring heroic tendencies. By 9 years old boys can start showing signs of claiming and through play learning the art of exploration and conquest. With my character he had already begun this process at the age of 10 because his brother encouraged him. However, throughout the series I did want him to move on from the past. It’s just in this pilot we are learning about the past and he does begin to remember what it means to be brave. This is part of the reclaim process. As the series continues it will no longer be about reclaiming and overcoming his brother’s death but as the quest ramps up, it will be new aspects of maturity he will be learning, even thrusted into.
So to answer your question, yes, I believe he does have something to recover, albeit, not decades of experience, but experience he learned with help from his brother, who is now gone. But you are correct that after that process and grieving is complete he will face more in the near future.
So the question is, does the logline need to include that aspect of the future? There’s a hint of it in the pilot but it’s subtle and most likely will not come till a few episodes down the road.
Which creates greater dramatic contrast, conflict and suspense?
1] A character discovering something for the 1st time that requires — compels — a radical change of point of view, a radical change in behavior, that entails unfamiliar actions and undertaking ?risks one has never had to confront before. ?And forces the character to acquire an?emotional skill set to handle them. ?In every possible way, physically and psychologically, it’s?terra incognita. –? the character has no cognitive maps to guide him.?
The plot promises a journey into the complete unknown.
Or
2] A character rediscovering something. ? So the change of pov and behavior is not radical because the character has already done something similar before. Dealing with jeopardy is not an unfamiliar experience; he has already begun to acquire the emotional skill set to cope with the stress of risky situations. ?So that even if the physical territory is unfamiliar, the psychological?territory is not entirely. ?The character has a few cognitive maps to guide him.
?Hence, the plot promises a journey into the ?partially known.
So you’re saying the emphasis shouldn’t be on reclaiming what he had lost but what he will learn throughout the journey and that should be the goal stated in the logline, am I hearing you correctly?
I appreciate this process by the way, it’s helping.
Yes, I suggest pitch the story in terms of the adventure the dagger will take him on. ?I would de-emphasize (regressive) fantasies, emphasize the imagination as a well-spring for inspiration to move forward in lif, as a spur to adventures into the unknown.
It seems to me that the logline would be more effective if it invoked the archetypal imagination of the viewing audience in terms of the “Hero’s Journey” (which I assume you are familiar with). ?Vogel’s book, “The Writer’s Journey” about the “Hero’s Journey” as a plot paradigm was inspired by Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a 1,000 Faces”. ?And Campbell, in turn, was inspired by the writings of the depth psychologist C.G. Jung.
And Jung wrote : “Whoever speaks in primordial [archetypal] images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the ideas he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.”
Why did people stand in lines that stretched for blocks, for 24 hours or more, to see the original episode of “Star Wars” in 1977? ?And then stand in line and waited to see it again… and again… and again… and again? ?Because of the CGI, the special effects? ?Well, that too.
They stood in line because the movie spoke — sung — in a 1,000 voices. ?It hooked into the deepest, primordial yearnings of the human psyche. ?George Lucas?imagined characters the audience could identify with and root for, adventures they wanted to undertake, ?even if only vicariously.
What are the 1,000 voices your story speaks in? ?What elevates the predicament and struggles of the boy from the particular to the universal? ? What makes him a character and his struggle an adventure millions of other boys (and girls –something to think about) will want to follow episode… after episode… after episode… after episode for years?
I hear those 1,000 voices in your premise, but they seem distant and faint. ?I want to hear them loud and clear. ?(But then I have bad hearing, so?maybe the problem lies within my ears rather than the logline.)
fwiw
Thanks DPG! This gives me quite a bit to chew on. Gonna give it another go and write some more variations and share when I have them ready. Thanks so much for the time to respond!