by Chris McGinty
Nathan and I had a conversation a week or so ago and decided to call Miguel at some point. Miguel and I usually talk on Saturday. Nathan texted during that conversation. I decided to go ahead and call Nathan on three way.
The concept was to discuss screenwriting and what the elusive “they” are looking for in a script. It devolved into Miguel getting mad at me because I want to know, “What does it matter what they want in a screenplay, if you never write a screenplay?”
This is an ongoing conversation, because Miguel believes in a back door called a log line. If you craft an amazing log line that would make someone say, “I want to watch that movie!” you will have an edge There is a little bit of truth to this. When you’re coming up with ideas for what to write, it’s a very good method for finding the best idea.
I think where we see it differently is he doesn’t have a whole lot of time to write, so he spends some of his creative time thinking about the log lines; where I will do something different, and write down multiple ideas, then pick the one that I think is the most interesting.
Let me just take two random words here countryside and lineage. I’m going to come up with ten basic ideas.
1. A redneck family struggles with their ailing patriarch, a man who has always seemed strong, but is now a shell of his former self.
2. A family farm faces the possibility of having to sell to a big conglomerate when a government subsidy gets canceled.
3. While walking in the countryside one day a man finds a gravestone. When he inquires, it turns out he had a brother he never knew about.
4. The son of a famous country star must redeem himself after he tarnishes the family name by getting caught up in a scandal.
5. You know that one episode of the X-Files? That, but creepier.
6. A fire breaks out in the countryside, but the family that owns the land is not there at the time. The locals must band together in order to save the property.
7. While walking one day a man finds an injured eagle it seems like his path is clear to hey it help, until the eagle starts talking to him.
8. Two families build a fence between their lands and it starts a huge Feud
9. An Irish family finds out they have some German descent in them and for reasons that I can’t explain they start a suicide cult and then they all die.
10. A father and son get into a discussion about whether or not the 10th idea in this kind of list starts getting into the better ideas, or if by this point you’re just so tired of trying to come up with ideas that you hate yourself. Now, can you guess which one I agree with?
So now I could just pick any of those stories or none of them and just start writing. None of them are good log lines, but one of them might actually be good enough to start with. I feel like that the country singer one, if you kind of go the opposite of Hank Williams and his sons. Rather than being rebellious, the family has long been considered a moral family, and this guy’s gotten caught cheating on his wife with someone who works for the crew. The story is of him trying to redeem himself.
That would probably be the one I started on, or I would just come up with another list of stories and try to come up with something that I like more.
Chris McGinty is a blogger who may have dictated this blog post just to prove a point about just writing something and not worrying about whether it’s good.