Healing from the car accident that killed her husband, the young author purchases a mysterious antique mirror and falls in love with the handsome reflection who tells her fascinating stories of daring and adventure and betrayal.
WillowPenpusher
Healing from the car accident that killed her husband, the young author purchases a mysterious antique mirror and falls in love with the handsome reflection who tells her fascinating stories of daring and adventure and betrayal.
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Tells fascinating stories to what dramatic end? ? What’s the dramatic problem to be solved? ? The logline seems to suggest a string-of-pearls type of narrative rather than a causal one constituting a plot.
What’s the plot that arises from these circumstances. ?What becomes the author’s objective goal? ?Who or what opposes that goal? ?What’s at stake, which is to say what does she stand to gain by succeeding lose by failing.
Scheherazade told fascinating stories, too. A 1,001 of them. To solve an immediate dramatic problem: prevent the king from killing her, to stay alive. ?What’s the Scheherazade factor in this story?
The logline seems to convey the sense of a woman who is a helpless victim of circumstances. It describes her problem in specifics, but it falls short when it comes to describing a specific course of action she takes to solve her problem.
How does “do what needs to be done” translate into a specific course of action? ?In spite of her subjective problem — her grief –what exactly becomes her objective goal?
What is the real inciting incident anyway? ?The car accident or buying the mirror? ?Or is the car accident in the back story? ?Whatever, neither incident seems to trigger the woman into a course of action toward a positive, life-affirming, life-enhancing?objective goal. ?
Which is what an inciting incident is supposed to do, even though it initially creates a problem. ?The problem is a goad that motivates the protagonist to struggle toward a specific, positive goal. ?It may be the wrong goal or the protagonist may fail to achieve the goal, but at least she’s struggling toward a specific solution to her problem.
It’s not enough for a logline to describe a dramatic problem. ?It also needs to inform a producer or director exactly what course of action the protagonist ?will pursue to solve the ?dramatic problem. ?Not vaguely, but exactly, not in generalities but in specifics.
fwiw
What DPG said.
How about:
After falling in love with a mysterious reflection of a handsome man in an ancient mirror she found, a widow must work with a wizard to free her new love from a mirror world entrapment.
Just an example of how to include the death of her former husband, an inciting incident and goal.