#anyway mystery dungeon is fine except it’s an isekai

[thewadapan]

Pouncing on this post because I love writing blurbs, summaries, chapter titles, anything but the work itself really, c'est la vie.

It's definitely my experience that a lot of Alexander Wales fiction is kind of hard to sum up in words. I've had people ask me about This Used to be About Dungeons and Thresholder, and I always kind of stumble over what they're actually about, because the truth is they're both way down the rabbit hole of these niche microgenres—dungeon stories, jumpchain—but they're written to be these standalone novels, not as derivative works that assume basic pre-existing familiarity with these genres, like a lot of contemporary webfiction on somewhere like RoyalRoad. For the logline, you can't just say like, "dungeon-delving story dun good", or "jumpchain dun good", you have to approach it from this entirely in-universe perspective. In the case of Thresholder especially, that is such a sprawling and wide-ranging story that at most points would bear little resemblance to its logline.

I guess my question would be like, okay, but if we limit it strictly to films—which by their nature usually have much tighter plotlines than long-form works—are there that many examples where it really is impossible to reverse-engineer a compelling logline? I kind of feel like I could do it for most films that I like. It would have to be exception, not the rule.

Also, it's been said, but god, that Dark Wizard of Donkerk logline really begs the question of why it's called that if there's two Dark Wizards. Yeah that's a good-ass novel with a serious marketing problem.

Anyway I can't help myself so here are some loglines, for various original stories I've put serious time into developing but which are unlikely to see the light of day anytime soon:

Echo Chamber: In a post-apocalyptic world where everyone has weird superpowers and no memory of how they got there, a person with the ability to clone themselves infinitely joins a superhero team to stop an army of villains and find out where they came from. (The cloning power, which is the main focus/appeal, is a buried lede here. The villain-army comes across as random and generic. The ontological mystery isn't well-expressed.)

On Tilt: Transported to a fantasy civilization spread out across an infinite ski slope, a teenager from Earth must discover why the slope has started tilting, before it becomes too steep for anyone to survive there. (I love infinite worlds, apocalypse fiction, and isekai, so you're gonna see a few recurring themes here. This one is fine but sort of begs the question of what an Earth teenager is doing in this story at all. Buddy, I've been asking that from the start, so no wonder this one never got off the ground.)

Hollows & Humans: An adventuring party of dragons set out to steal a rare piece of treasure for their hoards... from the fortress of a fearsome human dragon-slayer. (I think this one's pretty good. It coheres, and it obviously has that irony Snyder was banging on about.)

Romance @ The Rig!: The hottest new reality streaming show puts a dozen contestants on a converted oil rig resort to find true love, win YOUR votes, and try very hard not to think about the fact there might not be a world to go back to. (Mostly happy with this one too, although the setting's background context is a little too vague and tacked-on. The title is very much a placeholder though, I hate it.)

UNICORN PRINCESS APOCALYPSE!: A princess wakes up 100 years after the fall of her father's kingdom, and sets out to reunite her people and kill the immortal necromancer responsible for the apocalypse. (I was really happy with this concept when I came up with it, but it is very derivative, and I do feel like this logline inadvertently omits all the details that made my take compelling.)

[Title is a spoiler]: Twelve years after the accident that ended his career, an aging ex-trucker discovers that a UFO crash-landing was to blame, and must guide the extra-terrestrial on a dangerous journey back up one of Canada's winter roads before the ice melts.

That's the one I should be working on right now, actually. Sorry, I've been wasting a lot of time on tumblr today. Let me leave you with a poll—

Save the Cat is a snappy read, and only 8 chapters, so I'm just doing a liveblog of them unless I get bored or distracted.

Chapter one is about the pitch, the logline, the title, what you put on a poster and how you sell it. It doesn't necessarily come first, but I get the sense that for Snyder this would be his preferred way of doing it. (A logline is just the one-sentence "what is it about" that you use to sell people on the idea.)

Snyder says that writing loglines is awful, soul-crushing work, and I agree there. I'm awful at it. But Snyder also says that if you don't have a good logline, maybe there's something wrong with your movie, and that I don't agree with.

I think there's a fairly wide set of stories that have good, snappy, easy loglines, and are also good stories. But I think there are other stories that are good stories and don't have a great way to pitch them. The lack of a good pitch can exist for a lot of reasons, and sometimes it's just that it's more complex than can be summed up in a single sentence, or even a handful of sentences. I think in practice writers will often dumb down the story for the logline, lying about what's contained within, just to make sure that it will sell, that people will want to know what's inside.

One of the other main points of the chapter is that a good logline has irony to it, a twist inherent in the title, some kind of thematic tension, and I disagree with that too, maybe not from the standpoint of selling a script, but from the standpoint of storytelling.

Why does everything have to have an irony to it? Why does everything have to have a twist? Why can't we have stories that are just well-told explorations of conflict and character? It's like at some point people decided that they only wanted Distinct Pieces of Media, so if you wanted to tell a story that's been told before, something with its own unique texture, you're just shit out of luck.

I find this all the more irritating because often the twist/irony/idea/pitch is good, and then the execution is shit, and then people don't want that idea again. It's not like you can say "like that thing that flopped, but good".

Blake Snyder is trying to tell good stories, but he's also trying to sell stories, and this is a good thing for authors to know how to do. I accept this. I just don't like it.

So as a writing exercise, here are some loglines for things I've written, without the amount of care and polish and revision that a good logline needs:

Worth the Candle - A teenaged dungeonmaster gets thrust into the worlds he's created, where his recently deceased friend is a historical figure. (This is bad, not short and snappy enough.)

This Used to be About Dungeons - Five young adults team up to delve dungeons and bake pies. (I don't know man, I said I was bad at this.)

Thresholder - A man travels through portals to different worlds and genres, gathering powers and skills as he fights other people just like him.

Shadows of the Limelight - In a world where fame gives you power, a fanboy saves the life of the world's greatest hero in full view of the public.

The Dark Wizard of Donkerk - An orphan raised by two dark wizards adventures north with a wayward princess.

Millennial Scarlet - A gig-economy demon hunter grapples with the death of his mother and the plans she set up before she passed.

Alright, I found that less soul-sucking than usual, but I don't think that these are the oiled, muscular, perfectly toned and smiling loglines that are necessary to sell, just to be clear. The marketing unit of written fiction is not really the logline, though that helps, it's the blurb, and I am equally awful at writing those. I just don't agree with Blake Snyder that a blurb or logline coming poorly is a sign that you don't know the story.