As his best friend – an alcoholic old Hollywood star – begs for death, a young reporter sees his own fate and takes a dramatic step to rewrite the story of his life.
twincklerPenpusher
As his best friend – an alcoholic old Hollywood star – begs for death, a young reporter sees his own fate and takes a dramatic step to rewrite the story of his life.
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Gotta rethink this a bit.
Young people don’t usually keep old people as their best friends.
You go from begging for death, to another persons own struggles. This is odd, almost 2 stories as written. Try to join them somehow where it’s easy to understand.
While I understand where you are going with this, what you have written is just the inciting incident, it’s the set-up to your story, the story would be what the lead character does about it.
One more note, what I am about to say may not be true in the story but it does come across in the logline.
The lead character comes across as very self-centered. His best friend?begs for death, and his thought is… I really need to re-evaluate my life.
This is not a good friend. A good friend would try to help his best friend rediscover his love for life. Instead, his best friend begs for death and the lead character decides, this is really all about me.
If this is not true (That the lead isn’t self-centered) you might want to re-write the logline to reflect the true character of your lead.
If it is true (That your lead character is actually totally self-centered) you might want to add in your logline a reason for us to like your lead character and want them to succeed.
Agreed with Richiev, the MC sound selfish and the plot is unclear.
Why not make the inciting incident his friend’s suicide, so it’s his friend’s death that shakes his world up and motivates him to do better himself.
As the others have said.
The logline is slotted in the Biography genre.? So does that mean it’s based on the real life of an alcoholic Hollywood star?? (If so, who?)? Or is it a fictional character?? If it’s fictional,?then it’s not a biography.
Unlike others, I don’t find the protagonist to be selfish. It’s someone who had both lost a friend and got a wake=up call. I think the logline should include what actions were taken after the wake-up call.
Using what you wrote in a comment above:
After his best friend ? an alcoholic old Hollywood star ? dies, a young reporter see his own fate, quits drinking, and meets people who would teach him how to walk on his own and rewrite the story of his life.
You’d have to elaborate a bit on “meets people”. What kind of people? Small town? Eccentric? Lost souls? Wise women? Recovering alcoholics??
The hope would be those people are interesting characters themselves.
Great pick up on the theme, and your rewrite sez you got it. My problem with this exercise is knowing where a logline ends and a tagline/pitch begins. ?The joy of this exercise is seeing the memoir as a movie with a dramatic opening scene – so shocking that I sometime think it was made up – that is the start of my ?hero?s? journey. It is helping me re-shape the book itself.
…and thanks for taking the time
>>>>a young reporter sees his own fate and takes a dramatic step to rewrite the story of his life.
Exactly what is the dramatic step?? What is the inciting incident that motivates him to take that dramatic step?? What becomes his objective goal as a result of witnessing his best friend’s alcoholism?
I have to admit this is not the easiest?story to write a logline for
———————————————
“After reading the diary he inherited from his mentor, a depressed reporter realizes he is headed down the same path as his suicidal friend and must re-write his life if he is to save himself from a similar unhappily-ever-after.”
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Possible Title: “Recalculating”?
I see only one action. ?A dramatic step? what is it and what issues does it raise?
A young alcoholic journalist sets out to stop drinking and change his life but he is undermined by the industry culture and the relationships needed to build a career.
Glad your brother prevailed. My story is a bit different. I was a born alcoholic and didn?t see myself until I saw my friend in his death throes.
I can?t for some reason make comments in the right box so here they are in the review box: dpg, the inciting incident is the moment I saw my friend begging for death. The antagonist is the bottle. Resolution is finding your own power after losing that of the bottle. an old story that is the nut of the big picture story of the transformation I went through during the 7 years in that farm town. So hard to capture this in a log line. What a remarkable exercise.
Twinckler:
I know only too well from personal experiences in my family, among my friends and in my work how destructive and demoralizing alcoholism is to the lives of tens of millions of people.? ?I have a deep respect for anyone who has beat the odds.? It takes a heroic struggle for an alcoholic to achieve and maintain sobriety.
But…
When it comes to drama, alcoholism is almost always a character flaw that does more than threaten a character’s health and happiness; it prevents the protagonist from achieving some goal beyond sobriety.? Like hold a marriage together, keep a job, salvage a career.
Consequently, achieving sobriety is a necessary means to a necessary end; it is not the end of the story itself.? Rather, it entails the resolution of a character arc? that is necessary to achieve an overarching objective goal.
Based upon what you have said, I can see that you can salvage a lot of material from you own personal experience for a compelling “B” story; that is, a subplot about your deeply conflicted relationship? with the Hollywood has-been.? But the subplot must be in service of the “A” story, the struggle of the protagonist for sobriety as a necessary step (or should I say 12 steps?)? to achieving some objective goal after he has achieved sobriety.
Therefore, I suggest that for the story you aspire to write “takes a dramatic step to rewrite the story of his life” needs to be defined more specifically.? It needs to be translated into a specific objective goal that he can only achieve after he achieves sobriety.? And the logline needs to be framed accordingly.
fwiw
Twinckler,
Think of the main character’s completion of the inner journey (in your case it should be him overcoming alcoholism) as a requested for him to complete the outer journey, be it what it may. The greatest stories about the greatest heroes of all time force the hero to overcome a character flaw before they are allowed to achieve their main goal or outer journey goal.
As DPG pointed out, alcoholism is a character flaw for your MC,? now come up with a good outer journey goal for the ‘A’ plot in the story.
A spotlight went on when I saw myself in my friend begging for death….A few days later when I rejected alcohol at my first AA meeting, a floodlight came on – illuminating my inteior flaws. The party was over. I knew I would never drink again (except for the night 4 years later when a guerrilla comandante on a volcano shoved a glass of Castro?s rum at me – but that?s the next book),. ?Now came the hard part. ?Years of repair. Of rebuilding a strong self. ?My heroe?s journey was gritty, ponderous at times. ?Like most are. Perhaps all. One of my heroes ws a man who builts schools out of adobe and dug outhouses in Guatemala. It was only after he died that I discovered he had won a bronze star in WWII by charging a machine gun nest. But I digress…
Alcohol unleashed the lightning bolt in me. Now I had to harness its energy. It took four more years in that little farm town, rebuilding my spine by absorbing their stories. Flinally I reacheda point of decision – stay and marry my bluegrass singer girlfriend or – grateful for the experience – move on to pursue dreams I had never given up.
By the way – thanks you all for pitching in on this exercise.