Friday Office Hours: Call for loglines

Send me your good, your bad, your ugly, but send it in one sentence.

Hello and TGIF!

Before I reveal the theme of this week’s open call, I want to thank all of you who send in nice notes when you subscribe. I get those notes, and I love reading them, but Substack hasn’t invented an easy inter-platform way for us creators to reply, so I wanted to say thank you, here, for those lovely notes and insights into your writing journeys. They mean a lot to me.

Now on to the open call for submissions!

In this week’s Wednesday post, I confessed that I use loglines to unearth what I want to write, and why (and also to illustrate whether or not I have a plot). For our first Friday Office Hours of the fall, I’d like to workshop your loglines. Before we get into participation rules, here’s a refresher on what I think loglines are.

There are two versions of loglines in my book:

1. The straight up logline (or elevator pitch).

2. The XY formula.

Are there cracks in your logline? Photo by Simon Stankowski on Unsplash

In the classic logline version, you use a single sentence to illustrate the main components of your project regardless of genre (the main character, setup/setting, central conflict, evil entity you [or your main character] will fight against). Loglines are the summaries that used to appear on the Netflix red envelopes. Today, you can read them by hovering on the movie poster of any given film on Netflix, but the lines have become much shorter than they used to be. (I don’t envy the copywriter who had to shorten those short lines!)

Here’s a refresher of what you want to go for:

Option 1: The classic logline

From a presentation of mine at the Women’s Fiction Writers Association

And here’s the second take.

Option 2: The XY logline formula:

From a presentation of mine at the Women’s Fiction Writers Association

The XY formula uses a comp title from outside of the publishing industry (usually a movie or television show) to swiftly telegraph the main conflict in your book and communicate its “vibe.”

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How to send me your loglines for a potential workshop here on Substack

First of all, you need to be a paid subscriber to participate in Friday Office Hours. If you want to upgrade to paid and then cancel your subscription if your logline isn’t critiqued, go with God, but don’t be emailing me loglines if you aren’t a paid subscriber. (Like Santa, I’ll be checking.)

In an email to me at: thequerydoula (at) gmail (dot) com, please send in the body of the email:

• The title and genre of your book/story.

• A super brief description of what your project is about (doesn’t have to be well written, more important to keep it to one paragraph, max).

• Your logline. One sentence gets puffy sticker stars and my eternal admiration. Two sentences, I’ll forgive you. Three sentences, I won’t consider the material for workshop. (There is value in synthesizing exercises like this: they make you write concisely and focus on plot.)

• I’ll read loglines from Friday November 3rd to Wednesday November 8th (in 2023, worth stating.) After that date, your email might not get read.

• Don’t send me anything that you wouldn’t want to see reproduced here on my Substack.

• I will only get in touch if I intend to use your logline here in a Substack workshop. I can’t use them all, I’m sorry!

• Please use the email subject line: “Loglines” when you email me your submission.

And that’ll do it!

I look forward to reading them.

Good news is in short supply lately so I’m extra happy to announce that the writer Caroline Shannon Karasik has teamed up with other talented writers and activists to start an anti-capitalism book publishing collective! It’s called Quilted Press and Caroline did a wonderful interview right here on Substack about it with

Sari Botton

of

Memoir Land

where Caroline discussed how to publish as a collective using crowd funding.

Welcome to the world Quilted Press!

Speaking of crowd funding, Quilted Press has a Kickstarter campaign going until November 10th. You know how Kickstarter works— if Quilted Press doesn’t meet their financial goals by November 10th, all the money disappears. Let’s help Caroline and friends to exceed their financial goals: you can visit their Kickfunder here!

Lots of congratulations to Caroline and her cohort on the launch of this wonderful initiative.

Thanks as always for being here, everyone!

Courtney