Where Was the Battle of the Log Lines on This One?

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I hope everyone’s Christmas (or whatever you choose to or decline to celebrate) was merry and bright. That goes without saying.

Last week, the Query Tracker blog featured a must-read post on log lines. For the new writer or others out of the loop, a log line is a one sentence explanation of your book (or movie) meant to hook the audience. Think bubble blurbs under a channel you have surfed to, or for those who remember TV Guide, a comprehensive yet pithy summary of this week’s episode. An example from one of my favorites, That ’70’s Show:

Bohemian Rhapsody
Donna takes some “creative” photos of herself to send to Eric, but unfortunately they end up in the wrong hands.
One sentence. We know who is experiencing the dilemma, and we can deduce what “creative” means in the sentence (racy? pin-ups? NUDE?). From there, the imagination takes us on a course of possible plot twists that might result from the shift in story line. There is enough information there to either tease a fan to flip the channel (or put in the DVD) at the appointed time. For those who despise the program, there is also enough for the hater to make a decision to pass.
A log line is the basis of the standard elevator pitch, where the author has three to five minutes to convey the essence of their work to an agent. Sometimes we pitch via email, but more frequently the pitching is done at crowded conferences where every wannabe author is nervous and perspiring. Been there. You could chop through the anxiety with a machete and build huts for the homeless with the resulting debris. Building a pitch is much like writing a news story. Start with a solid log line, then attach the next most important sentence, and the next. Make the first 25 words the best you can and read it out loud. And then of course, you’re going to edit that baby until it sounds professional, and you’re going to practice it so many times, you’ll be blurting it out in your sleep.
In my case, on my first effort, I found it nearly impossible to get the gist of my story down to 50 words. I had a hard time getting it under two pages. Thank goodness, with some coaching from my cheering squad, some great reference books, and years of practice, I’m doing much better now. 🙂

This isn’t the only reason why, but writers should practice crafting log lines, and pitches, even as you struggle to write to those magic words “The End”. Your novel might be the next New York Times best seller, but in order to sell it to an agent, your pitch, whether written or verbal, has to be totally outstanding. Even if you decide to self-publish, if your blurb doesn’t catch the eye of your potential reader, you might as well go home and start over. If the premise doesn’t sound massively appealing to you, how do you expect it to sound to a stranger? You might also want to practice log line writing in order to test your story. Is there something about your novel that sets it apart from the others in your genre? If the premise is the same old formula (for example, boy meets girl, they fall in love, there’s conflict, they get back together and live happily ever after) (or, for those action lovers, man goes to work just as the world is beginning to end, the government enlists him to help save the world, there’s conflict, but he saves the world and everyone lives happily ever after), how is your log line/pitch written so that it transcends stereotypes and sounds fresh?

I am musing today over log lines, because this weekend, after a marathon of cleaning, a massive consumption of food, and the requisite present opening, I had the opportunity to catch two movies. Both were released in 2011. Each starred a former actor from That ’70’s Show. Both were cute, light, romantic comedies. And both were basically the very same story. Blatantly the same.

One was No Strings Attached, the other was Friends with Benefits.

Or, boy and girl suffer from bad relationships, decide to hook up with unsuspecting friend for relationship-less sex-capades, but eventually – and despite many denials to the contrary – fall in love with the booty call, and live happily ever after.

Watching these movies made we wonder if the same writers were working on both projects. Or if Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis discussed their simultaneous projects in friendly phone conversations. (Maybe they don’t talk to each other anymore?) I then wondered if anything could be done to either one to make one movie stand out from the other. (No. The only thing that could have been done was to release one of the movies a year from now.) Maybe Kutcher and Kunis should have done one of the movies together, leaving Justin Timberlake and Natalie Portman to do the other.

As a writer, I think of my stories as completely unique. But is anything really unique? The challenge is to write the best story you possibly can, and use your log line as a tool.

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The Art of a Creative Real Life

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I am guilty about complaining about Real Life.

How can I not complain? I’m a busy girl, with lots of interests. I love learning about new things. I consider myself an artist. Ever since I can remember, I’ve had a pen in my hand, or charcoal, or paints, or guitars, yarn, violins, hand shovels, fabric, beads, wire, jewels, or exotic food. I’m learning Japanese, in my car and via Rosetta Stone. I read like there’s no tomorrow, not only fun novels and engrossing literary fiction, but history books and biographies. The tired old adage of not having enough hours in a day doesn’t begin to describe the frustration I feel as minutes tick by and my List of Things to Do is not even approaching completion.

Let’s face it: mundane Real Life, with its responsibilities and drama, often keeps me from my Creative Life. There’s a lot of items on the “CON” side. I have kids – yes, they are grown, so what? grown up kids often have grown up problems – and a business – several, actually – and it all sucks up my time. I have a house (huge) and a yard (even huger), both of which require constant maintenance. On the flip side, the Real Life gig does pay the bills, a huge plus on the “PRO” side.

My one defense in the fight against Real Life doldrums is to approach Real Life with a different perspective. It’s really not so hard; you must be creative in order to obtain a creative Real Life.

It’s easy to find inspiration when you’re young and unattached, moody and naive, and infinitely more difficult, albeit not impossible, as you are weighed down by things like paying the rent and starting a family. When my kids were very small, I tapped into my creative side. I used to make their clothes, and of course, cooking is a wonderful way of crafting edible creations.

Soon my days became more harried and time evaporated, but I strove to make every action a creative one. I’m sure my son’s second grade teacher, Mrs. Siciliano, did not appreciate my heart-felt and inspired apologies for his abhorrent behavior, but hey, you do the best you can with what you have.

I’m flabbergasted by the number of people who sit in front of a device and play games or who are otherwise ‘entertained.’ Granted, I’m a huge offender. It’s easy to get sucked into the vortex of Facebook, TV, or video games (or a number of other mindless distractions) and spend their precious time wasting it away. I’m constantly amazed by people who see what I’m doing and declare, “I’m not creative at all!” I want to shake them silly and say, “Yes, yes, you are! Give yourself a chance.” A person doesn’t have to accomplish a task with pinpoint accuracy; the main thing is to try. The only way to get the juices stimulated is by making the attempt, or in my case, the many attempts. Learn from your mistakes; correct them, and move on.

My time is limited, but I don’t let the lack of it limit me. If the phone’s not ringing at work, I will twist up some wire while I wait for the action to begin. As much as I strive to carve out a niche of quiet for myself, I often don’t have time to pound out a chapter in one of my novels. If that’s the case, I might open one of my blogs (as I’m doing here) and write a few words, or take out my notebook and read what I’ve written in the past and jot down new ideas. I’ll use bits of time to research, update, and catalog.

Living a creative Real Life isn’t a given. It takes dogged determination and a desire to make everything and anything you might endeavor to do a work of art.

Isn’t that what life’s all about?

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Vacation Over, Back to Work

Posted by Joanne Huspek

The end of NaNoWriMo brings forth many emotions. If you were successful in clocking in 50K words, you’re heady with excitement. If you somehow didn’t make it (I refuse to say ‘fail’ – let’s just call it a momentary setback), you are kicking yourself in the posterior.

This year, I made it. True, the ‘finished’ product is far from a finished novel. In fact, this particular pile of slop doesn’t even have the words “The End” attached to the last page. But…the story is all there for later mucking.

After the marathon writing, squeezing in paragraphs during slow minutes at work, up early, up late while my husband was out of town, I was spent. It’s how it goes. So it’s not unusual for a certain amount of decompression to take place after all that effort.

Need I say it? The last nine days were spent in literary vacation. Oh, I read a lot, on a round trip to Colorado, especially, I just didn’t write anything.

I have pronounced the vacation officially over; it’s time to get back to work.

First off, I have a contest or two to enter, so I need to go over my intended manuscripts and make changes before the end of the month. Then I have Cadence to edit, which is now coming back to me 20 pages of edits at a time. I need to finish re-editing Virtually Yours, and also finish up Clementine.

(Note to reader: I am talking to myself. Excuse me.)

Added to my list of things to do is Christmas. Oh, the dreaded December. My daughter has decided to come home for the holiday. There’s massive cleaning (construction workers in the house, it’s terribly dusty), and other Real Life stuff, but I’m going to try my best to adhere to the wonderful schedule I managed to come up with during NaNoWriMo. Hint to other writers: it’s not so much the schedule, it’s making the most use of your time. Write as fast as you can. 🙂

That’s the entire purpose of NaNoWriMo – not to finish a novel or craft a best seller. It’s to instill a rhythm of writing.

I’m busy. How about you?

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Another Successful 30 Days

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Do you hear the celebratory cheering? The hoorays? The clink of champagne glasses?

No? Then you must not be in tune with the results of this year’s NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month.

See?

At about 10:30 a.m. Eastern, I decided to test my Word’s word count feature and try to validate my NaNo novel, the sequel to Virtually Yours – NaNo winner of 2009. (Also known as Virtually Yours, a Love Story in Thirty Days.) I call the new book VY2. (The new working title is Virtually Ours, a Wedding in Thirty Days, but I don’t know how that’s going to play out once I finish the book. Things can change.) As writers know, the word count feature can be flawed, so I wrote more than I thought was necessary. To my pleasant surprise, my official total was more than what was necessary: 50,149.

As I pointed out in the previous post, I’m most successful with NaNoWriMo when I have a plan, and this year I had a dilly of a plan. In fact, I began plotting this book back in the summer. I was also infused with a swell of ambition, not something this ordinarily lazy person has most of the time. I wrote nearly every day, and found myself feeling awful if I didn’t make time to write. I hope I can carry this work ethic beyond today.

While the book is far from finished, I’ve managed to formulate the story lines, strengthened the characters, and added the requisite twists and turns. There are several Big Reveals, none as big as the original, but I hope they’ll do. I tried something new this year; I wrote each POV separately and merged them all together this morning. I found that I could keep the separate stories more separate that way, and wasn’t as apt to repeat myself.

The next step is to print everything out, cut the scenes apart, and rearrange them in the order I want them to appear in the final book, fill in the color, correct my mistakes. And add the rest of the ending. 🙂

For a preview hint of what’s in this one, there’s the upcoming wedding of the decade between a NYC socialite and a romance novelist, their Internet friends (the Virtual Moms), an impossibly too small Vera Wang gown and an antique corset, reminiscing, a death, a runaway, a sex kitten next door who means to take one of the husbands, a sex-cort job offer, a hyper-self-conscious heavy woman who won’t say yes, a wildly popular talk show, the snowstorm of the century and displaced travelers, and the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. Oh, and a mad blogger.

Whee! I’m so happy. You really can’t hear that celebration? or are you deaf? 😛

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Strategies for NaNoWriMo

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Holy cow, is it November again?

Yes, I am again participating in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, even though I have been waist-deep in an edit/re-write and have a hundred other items on my list of things to do.

Why, do you ask, would I NaNo? Well, the main reason is I’m lazy the other eleven months of the year. I need November’s NaNoWriMo to kick my ass.

I know, I know, I could levy a self-imposed deadline such as NaNo’s race to complete 50K words in thirty days any other time – let’s say in February or September – but I have little willpower. Plus I am easily distracted.

In order to cross the 50K finish line this year, I’m going to take some pretty severe actions. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Get off Facebook. Should be easy, especially since the recent Facebook upgrade, which made visiting there and hanging out a major pain in the butt. Plus, it seems that every time I sign in, some bug locks up my computer. Another good reason to stay away.

2. Minimize Twitter. That used to be easy until I got an HTC EVO phone. Looking at tweets is entirely too simple these days. I know, I’ll turn off my phone!

3. Stop wasting time with meals and meal preparation. I see a lot of ramen noodles, tuna fish and take out in my immediate future.

4. Get up early. I need to do this to complete my Real Life chores, but with the extended Daylight Savings Time and my oncoming SAD, I’m finding that difficult. It’s still freaking dark at 7:30! Perhaps next Sunday when it will FINALLY be Daylight Savings Time, I will be able to report myself in better humor.

5. Suspend working on my re-write. This will be tough, but necessary. It’s good to put a little distance, particularly since I’ve been at it full bore since the end of August. I have a feeling the 30 day vacation will yield positive results.

6. Use Write or Die. This is the ultimate cattle prod for reluctant writers. If you’re a procrastinator with ADD tendencies, I would strongly recommend this program. Using it I’ve whipped up a thousand words in twenty minutes or less.

6a. Download Write or Die on every computer you use. That’s right, even the work computer. Once you pay $10 for the computer version (the online version is free), your payment entitles you to unlimited downloads of Write or Die. Two words: Do it!

7. I’m also going to join the local NaNo group. There’s nothing like a community flogging to get your butt in gear. Reach out to other writers who plan on marathoning this month.

As for the mechanics of NaNoWriMo (or the mechanics of writing any novel, period), try making it easy on yourself. Here are some things the fledgling writer can think about while dreaming of penning the next breakout novel:

1. Have a plan. For real. A novel must have three things: a beginning, a middle and an end. Without those three things, you don’t have a story, you have stream of consciousness writing. There’s nothing wrong with streaming – actually, my first NaNoWriMo effort was a unruly stream that resulted in the completion of my first novel. Streaming may give you ideas for story lines, but if the goal is writing a book, don’t forget the beginning, middle and end.

2. Outline. This is hard for me, and I never did it before, but it makes perfect sense. Most people don’t jump into the car and drive away without a road map, they have a map and money for gas to get them to their destination. Figure out before you sit down at the computer where your characters are going and how they’re going to get there.

3. Write everywhere. Give yourself the luxury of little notebooks for those times you’re not close to the computer/typewriter/notepad.  Use your iPad. Since my story includes a blog, I have set up my fictional blog online, and plan on contributing to it every day this month. Hey, what can I say? Words are words.

My goal is to get ‘er done, peeps.

This year’s effort is the sequel to VIRTUALLY YOURS, yet unnamed (so far referred to as VY2). And yes, I have a game plan, story lines, unknowns, and the requisite Big Reveal toward the end of the story.

It’s early (7:31 a.m.) but I have to get on the move. See you in December.

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The 20 Percent Solution

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I have a novel that is very nearly ready for the big time – the Big Time being self-publishing online. I even have a cover for said novel, and am attempting to convert the insides to a format the web will accept.

The next step (well, once it’s ready to launch), is getting the word out.

However, you can hear me whining from across the room. “I’m a writer, why do I have to sell? Shouldn’t I be writing?”

Yes, I should, but I’ve come to believe taking your work to the next level is really not that difficult. Even if you’re picked up by an agent, they’ll expect you to do some of the work. Anyone pitching a book (and a few other things I can think of) will need two things – a passion and a plan.

The passion part is easy. I really, really love my book. I like how I took a tiny piece of my Real Life, folded in a ridiculous premise, stirred gently with some over-the-top characters, added a few unlikely situations, and voila! VIRTUALLY YOURS  was born. I must have the passion. I’ve entered VY into contests and placed. When asked about my hobbies, I mention, “Oh, yes, I write novels in my spare time.” (!!! What spare time???) I go full bore into the story line, which isn’t hard to do. I’ve been elevator pitching anyone with ears since I wrote the last two words “The End.” The positive feedback is that I’m often asked when it will be coming out or could they read it.

But I know my passion isn’t going to see me through. It’s going to take some work, hard work, the kind of hard work I am loathe to do.  The kind that starts with an “S”.

Selling. Ugh. Do I really, really have to?

In a word, YES.

I had lunch last week with my MR ED, who is really excited about my book. No, really, almost as excited as I am, if that’s even possible. I wimped and whined about selling… There’s such a used car salesman stigma to selling your work. After all, in their heart of hearts, any artist believes that the work is so uniquely special it should sell itself.

Right.

There is also the “pushy” factor. No one wants to be known as that person. It appears gauche to pepper the Twittersphere with “Buy My Book” pleas, or to toot your horn (too loudly) on Facebook. If the recipients are anything like me, with too many blasts, they’ll drop you like a red hot tater and buy something else.

This is not to say I have never purchased a book from a friend or writing ally. The difference in the pitch is the delivery.

But let’s face it, now that you’re releasing your book to the masses (hopefully more than those dozen people who are related to you), you are now departing the world of the arts for the world of commercial enterprise. There is a fine line between tacky and thorough.

As for TIME (which is all important), Mr. ED came up with a boffo solution: The 20% solution. It’s a fabulous plan.

The best part is that it’s painfully easy. Take 80% of your time and work on the creative. Write to your heart’s content, or discontent. I would consider such items as classes or workshops in this category. Stretch your brain when you hit a writer’s block.

The remaining 20% is for the those tasks no writer wants to think about. The first thing that comes to mind is the technical aspects, like maintaining a blog, trying to convert your novel, or the dreaded selling your book.

It’s actually a pretty good solution for a common problem. Compartmentalizing your tasks might also help you stay on task, which is my biggest issue. I don’t need huge, nebulous deadlines, I need small, easy-to-reach deadlines.

I’ll give it a go and let you know.

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Pay it Forward, Pay it Backward, Pay it Any Way You Can

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Goals. Like many writers, I have several with regard to writing, and coincidentally, many of these overlap my overall goals in life.

First and foremost is the honing of the craft. I wear many hats during the course of a day, and I can tell you from not-so-critical observation that not everyone can write. I’m in the position of speaking to many teenagers and their families in my Real Life work. Keep in mind, I’m not referring to the stellar among us, because I’ve met those too, and they give me hope. But I am concerned because some can barely string a sentence together, much less a story. It’s been said that our high school graduates have the writing and comprehension skills of fifth graders. The theories regarding this phenomenon are many: it’s the culture, it’s TV, it’s the Internet, it’s the schools who consistently pass kids who fail, it’s the parents who relinquish their roles as teachers to the system.

This is sad, not only for writers who long to reach an audience, but for potential readers. What are the chances that a writer with fifth grade comprehension can write the next For Whom the Bell Tolls? But let’s face it; I can’t change the world, I can only change myself. That’s why I continue to study, to read, and to improve myself in anyway I can.

Number Two on my list is to stick with it until The End. Many don’t realize how difficult a task this is. Many writers have the best of stories and the best of intentions of finishing. Then Real Life rears its many heads. Our concentration is scattered; our time is divided and subdivided. I have to eat. My family might encounter a crisis or two. I might get lazy. I might take a look at the first 50K words and feel a range of emotions, including dejection, depression, and discouragement . It’s easy to beat yourself up.

My first book took two full years to get to those two words, in part because I am relentless, in part because I thought the story was a good one, and in major part the three C’s – the cajoling, cheering, and cattle prodding of my many writer friends.

This brings me to Number Three on the list. Writers are a smart bunch. What one doesn’t know, another might. In my experience, they like to share, and why not? A good writer friend will slap you upside the head when you need it and pat you on the back when you deserve it – and Twitter your good fortune to their followers.

If you write and you have information, why not pay it forward, pay it backward, or pay it anyway you can?

Recently, I was commiserating with another struggling novelist regarding self-e-pubbing on a major web site. I’d printed out the manual a year ago, and struggled with the concept of formatting my Word document novel for the Kindle loving bunch. I tore out what little hair I had left and consumed enough Advil to rot my liver.

This person pointed me to another writer’s web site, which pretty much deconstructs the e-pub mystery in words I can understand. Genius.

The next week, I forwarded the same link to another writer.

Keeping what knowledge you do have under a bushel basket helps no one.  Build camaraderie and your reference base by spreading the word, because it’s true – you reap what you sow.

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