Fancy a quick one? Loglines and Blockbusters

How many streaming services fill your home screen? Netflix, Prime, Disney+... they keep stacking up, but are the stories getting any better?

As social media creators, we're all storytellers now, trained by character limits and attention spans to distill our thoughts into digestible pieces. But can we take a complex narrative and deliver it in two punchy lines?

In the film industry, we call this a log line - those brief descriptions you scroll through on Netflix. Yet ironically, our established storytellers seem to be moving in the opposite direction. When was the last time you saw a blockbuster under two hours? (Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" clocked in at 99 minutes, but since earning creative freedom, even he's embraced the epic runtime.)

This challenge of concision hit home when I released my first novel, adapted from a screenplay, last year. Wearing both author and marketer hats, I spent months crafting the perfect log line. Here it is:

"Three Liverpudlian gangsters play Dad to a small boy, amidst a Mob war, until they embroil a naive student & his penpal in their scheming. Following a trail of blood, a dark secret catapults one of the Scouse mob on a rescue mission with an unlikely hero."

Perhaps all our time on social media is creating a new generation of storytellers who understand the power of brevity. The future of streaming might just depend on it.

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[Feel free to check out my novel here: amzn.to/3PZEvyV ]