Hung Up on Hooks

ScriptFrenzy starts in about 48 hours and I've done little to prepare but think, daydream and watch videos. I was down on myself Friday for all the video watching in the last six months, blaming it for giving me my necessary story fix and taking the place of reading and writing. I still know that, as a writer, I need to bring the reading and writing of stories back into my life but I learned in the last few days there has been a tangible benefit to having immersed myself in filmed stories for months.

Last Thursday I received from the library four of the books on script writing I had sent for and as I've been reading and browsing in them I realized that the concepts and the references weren't as much of a garble as the last two years. I got the references to movies used as examples for a point. Sometimes I found myself thinking of other examples from something I'd seen recently.

For ScriptFrenzy this year, I'm planning to adapt Mobile Hopes my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel as a feature film with potential as a TV series with an ensemble cast. For the last few days I've been trying to create a logline and concept or hook in as succinct a way as possible. I do tend to the wordy. The novel or longish short story is more my forte.

Here is how I explained Mobile Hopes in 2008:

Set in a mobile home park Mobile Hopes features the lives of a dozen or more separate families through the summer and fall of 2008. Each family is living its own crisis that is impacted by the current events of July through November. From the immigrant family hoping for citizenship to the family forced out of their foreclosed home in the suburbs hoping for another chance at the brass ring, they epitomize the American Dream and breathe life into the headlines.

The concept is to create a novel out of a collection of short pieces--short stories, vignettes--so that a weaving together of a community is witnessed through the eyes of at least a couple dozen individuals. Each individual is undergoing challenges and crisis that are exacerbated by the current economic crisis.

Now I need to pare all that down to a couple of short sentences. I would say DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES in a trailer park. But not only housewives are major protagonists. My story isn't that cynical either. Nor do I envision it as anything remotely like a soap. The flavor would tend toward NORTHERN EXPOSURE with a hint of TWIN PEAKS.

You can read a snippet from the novel in the same post linked and quoted above.