Todd Terwilliger

T.S. Elliot, or somebody who looked a lot like him if you looked at him in a certain way, told me once that April was the cruelest month. Given the temperature the other day in New York City was ninety degrees in the shade, that the city had bypassed Spring all together for a sweltering August, I was, in that moment, almost faint and weak from thirst, inclined to agree. “By god,” I thought, “soon it’ll all be a- a-” “A wasteland”, ersatz Elliot answered, “exactly my point. Breeding lilacs and all that.” I don’t know anything about that lilacs bit, I’m a writer not a gardener. What I did know is that I was already behind in my Script Frenzy daily, weekly, and hourly quotas.

What is Script Frenzy? Picture a marathon for screenwriters, swap the 26 miles and 385 yards for 100 pages written, and swap out a day for a month, then swap them back, now swap them again, back, again, back, again- you get the idea. If you don’t, go here, it’s a much better explanation.

This year, I’ve decided to participate. Now, I don’t know anyone else’s process. I suspect they have most of their script idea planned, plotted, and prepared prior to the starting gun on April first. This was not to be for me. The only thing I had on April first was a vague notion that I wanted to write some sort of human driven drama that took place during the zombie apocalypse. It all made perfect sense to me. It still does, but don’t let that bother you.

In the spirit of procrastination, I decided now, on day eight, to chronicle my process of script creation (or lack thereof) so that future generations can mock me as the poseur that I aspire to be. Today, I thought, being the first of the series, to begin at the beginning: the logline.

Depending on who you ask, the logline is either terribly important or frightfully important. It’s a very short (one sentence usually) summary of the script. Figuring this out beforehand, rather than after, is extremely helpful because it is very much a map to the script. Having the map before beginning helps focus you on where you are going. Afterwords, it’s the most powerful tool for quickly describing what your story is. It is vital.

Of course, this being me, I did not configure my logline right away, that would have been too easy. Instead, I storyboarded some scenes, wrote a couple of pages that I consequently threw away, and THEN came to the logline. I am not a role model (obviously).

This is not a tutorial on logline writing, by the way. I’ve come up with a handful of variations, none of which are so good that I feel like I couldn’t rewrite it another dozen times. However, the best of the bunch (so far) is this:

In a remote cabin deep in zombie-infested woods, a timid youth must find the courage to save his fellow survivors by challenging the very man who rescued him from certain death.

What it does, more or less well (you be the judge), is lay out the essentials of my story in such a way to give the general gist and thrust of it without giving too much away. The important bits are:

• Who is the protagonist (and what’s his problem?)
• Who or what is going against him
• Where it is taking place
• And what sort of story is it

Those are the elements that make up the logline and I think I’ve basically got them there but, like I said, I could stand to revise and rewrite it a few more hundred times. But doing that would eat up even more into my Script Frenzy writing time that I’m busy eating into by writing this out- I can only procrastinate one way at a time!

Stay tuned: in my next scintillating installment, I’ll dissect, or vaguely allude to, the anatomy and ecology of my version of the zombie, soon to sluggishly ramble towards screaming extras with bulging bags of blood-packs strapped to their chests.

Until then, with all apologies to Stan Lee, Excelsior! (I always wanted to say that).

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