This book tells you to start by asking these questions:
What is it?
What's it about?
Who's it for?
Oh. I guess it makes sense to have that all figured out before you begin (unsuccessfully) writing scenes at 3am one night. No wonder I haven't opened that document (that left me so overwhelmed) on my desktop since that night. I don't know what my movie is really about. I mean I have an idea and I know who the characters are but I really don't know what it all means right now. So I will start by answering those questions. And see where it leads.
Next I need to be able to describe the story in one sentence. This sentence must all at once summarize the plot, have irony, elicit a good mental picture, pull you in while promising more, demonstrate a timeline and give you an idea of how big a production it will be.
I spent the better half my work day looking up loglines to movies that share something with the story I hope to tell. (Eventually. Even if it takes me 10 years to spit it out.)
An anthology of 5 different cab drivers in 5 different American and European cities and their remarkable fares on the same eventful night.
Night On Earth
Through the neighborhoods of Paris, love is veiled, revealed, imitated, sucked dry, reinvented and awakened.
Paris, Je T'aime
Three stories are connected by a Memphis hotel and the spirit of Elvis Presley.
Mystery Train
Follow the lives of 8 very different couples in dealing with their love lives in various loosely and interrelated tales all set during a frantic month before Christmas in London, England.
Love Actually
They came from Paris, Rome, London and Berlin to l'Auberge Espagnole...where a year can change a lifetime.
L'Auberge Espagnole
Several lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginners course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives.
Italian for Beginners
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