Dear Internet, thank you for playing Julie’s Novel Mad Libs.
Since I am now determined — determined, I say! — to come up with a one-sentence (or logline, as I now know to call them) that seems exciting to
Thanks to
—
A young widow’s suicide attempt awakens her werewolf heritage.
—
Which works pretty well I think. But it could have more zazz.
So I tried this:
—
A young Seattle widow’s suicide attempt awakens her werewolf heritage.
—
Still not zazz enough. After going back and forth with Tinatsu a few times, I came up with:
———-
A young window’s struggles to create a new life for herself in Seattle are upended when a vicious attack awakens her werewolf heritage.
———-
I had been going away from urban crime because it felt so cliched, but it makes more sense to me in somebody new to a particular city. Maybe she could be from a really small town or something and just not recognize the signs of an imminent mugging. And even though her desire to stay in Seattle is important, she doesn’t have to have been there all along. She just has to like it more than anyplace else she’s been.
Then, I was thinking about catchy careers a person might have that would make being a werewolf difficult. At one point the novel had a whole sub-plot about her trying to keep afloat the video game company her husband started, but somehow that wasn’t working. So I was hanging onto the idea that she has a hard time being a programmer because of neural rewiring (many parts of her brain are now devoted to wolfing duties) and general physical restlessness. But I think that’s way too subtle to work as part of the implicit pitch, and maybe that means it’s too subtle to work as storytelling.
So I cast about for other jobs, things like "day care provider" or "veterinarian" or "EMT" — but I feel like if you want writing about somebody’s job to be compelling, the writer needs to understand the job really well. You know, the way you understand it if you’ve actually done it, or if you’ve been married for years to somebody who does it.
Still, I kind of like this one:
———-
After the untimely death of her husband, a veterinarian struggles to create a new life for herself in Seattle — only to have everything go off the rails when a vicious attack awakens her werewolf heritage.
———-
Er… "go off the rails" is perhaps not the best phrase, but all I can think of now are ones that sound a bit silly in this context, like "only to have everything go all pear-shaped"
Anyway, since she can’t actually be a veterinarian after the wolfing (because of the animals losing it in her presence and her distracting urges to chase things, or perhaps eat them) I think it could come off a little more plausibly with just research and instinct. Also, it means she would know things about animal psychology that seem like they would be either useful, or irritating, since she doesn’t know to what extent werewolves think like regular wolves.
(I am not fond of the model of werewolves as mindless killing machines. But I think you can make them sufficiently scary by emphasizing the mysterious and unpredictable nature of what is going to make them think someone or something needs killing.)
Other random directions:
———-
A despairing young widow discovers that the reason her suicide attempts keep failing is because she is a werewolf. And the wolf wants to live. Even if it means killing her in the process!
———-
I don’t know about that last sentence, it just occurred to me as I was writing it, so I went there. I think I would have to pile on the black comedy if I go with that version.
———-
After the untimely death of her husband, an ex-member of a religious cult struggles to create a new life for herself in Seattle — only to have everything go off the rails when a vicious attack awakens her werewolf heritage.
———-
In her backstory, I keep going back and forth about how extreme I want her religious upbringing to be. Obviously this is the most extreme version.
But I could possibly make her specific neuroses the hook. As in:
—-
After the untimely death of her husband, a claustrophobic vegetarian’s suicide attempt awakens her werewolf heritage.
—-
Okay, let’s pile it all on!
———-
After the untimely death of her husband, a claustrophobic vegetarian masochist leaves a religious cult and struggles to create a new life for herself as a veterinarian in Seattle — complicated when a vicious attack reveals that she is hereditary queen of the werewolves.
———-
Too much? Or is that the point with this sort of thing? Maybe I could throw in pirates? Or zombie pirates?
Zombie pirate werewolf queen? Might be going too far.
Instead of “go off the rails” I think “only to have her plans derailed” might scan more readily. And I like the vet version. I think it would be hard to be a pacifist sort of person in a care-taking type of career and have your instincts now conflict with new, um, instincts. As it were.
Certainly!
After the untimely death of her husband, a claustrophobic vegetarian masochist leaves a religious cult and struggles to create a new life for herself as a veterinarian in Seattle — complicated when a vicious New Orleans zombie pirate attack reveals that she is hereditary queen of the werewolves.
But wait! It still doesn’t mention kittens!
After the untimely death of her husband, a claustrophobic vegetarian masochist leaves a religious cult and struggles to create a new life for herself as a veterinarian in Seattle — complicated when a vicious New Orleans zombie pirate attack reveals that she is hereditary queen of the werewolves, which she discovers when she nearly eats a kitten.
nearly eats a kitten
I am so in favor of this, I can’t even begin to tell you.
WIN. Though why she’s not yet concerned about the effect(or perhaps origin) of kitten-craving on her unborn child (cue dramatic sting) mystifies me. ;P
DUH DUH DUH!
The “struggles to create a new life for herself in Seattle” part is working better for me, as she now as a goal to sustain the story action.
I’m curious why the video game thing wasn’t working for you. That seems like it would be easy to come up with a compelling external goal to drive the plot from that. “After the untimely death of her husband, a grieving game programmer races to finish their biggest project in order to save their company (and herself from bankruptcy), when a vicious attack awakens her werewolf heritage.” (Heh–a game with werewolves? And thugs? Grand Theft Auto with werewolves?) What do you think the problem you were having was with the game company thread?
The veterinarian angle is interesting, though. Maybe you could work that in as a sub-plot. Maybe she has a friend that’s a vet, or she meets a potential love interest that’s a vet. In which case the accident would have been several months before, which is okay–it takes a while to finish a game. Esp. if hubby got killed at the beginning. Maybe they were out celebrating landing the contract for it when the accident happened.
I’m curious why the video game thing wasn’t working for you. That seems like it would be easy to come up with a compelling external goal to drive the plot from that.
Well, for me, that version of the story just wasn’t generating enough good conflict. I came up with problems like !inability to concentrate! !acts like a weirdo around investors! !discovers that she can’t stand the way one of her co-workers smells!
And that was really about it. Yes, it gave her an overall goal, but I wasn’t finding a lot of ways for that goal to generate forward story momentum. Maybe it’s because weird hours and strange behavior are kind of the norm in the video game world. It isn’t a bad fit for a werewolf. Things kept getting overly… cozy, almost. When it was supposed to feel like dangling on the edge of a precipice.
So I took a step back and started adding conflicts.
I tried it with the video game company losing their cool downtown space and having to move into her garage and then she loses the house. I tried it with her selling the house to keep the game company afloat. I tried it with her struggling to hang onto an increasingly surreal office-space type job as a database administrator so that she could use her income to subsidize the video game company.
But none of those were really working. I was feeling like it needed to be more of an actual horror story, rather than just — I don’t know “The IT Crowd with werewolves” or “Office Space with werewolves.”
Gotcha. Makes sense.
An idea that occurred to me yesterday: maybe she doesn’t have a career. Maybe part of the panic caused by her husband’s death is that she’s been supported by him while she’s been trying to find a job she can like and/or keep. So now she’s widowed and unemployed with no income. This would make going home to the bayou a more compelling choice. I don’t know where you’d want to go from here. Maybe she takes on a string of some unsuitable work out of desperation, like being a nanny or a bank teller or signs up at a temp agency. Maybe she gets messed up with some unsavory types promising fast cash, and she ends up with a cop on her tail.
I don’t know–what kind of precipice-dangling scenes were you envisioning?
I am going with the “just out of vet school” scenario — she has been supported by her husband for the past eight years. So she gets a job as a vet tech/assistant which 1. She has long dreamed of, and 2. She desperately needs in a financial sense. So her wolfiness causes maximum trouble there.
I don’t know–what kind of precipice-dangling scenes were you envisioning?
Constant threat of complete and utter disaster. That’s why the vet thing is working better, I think. Realizing that you can’t be a great programmer anymore and might end up being, I dunno, a marketing director instead — that just isn’t as horrifying as realizing that you have spent eight years of your life working toward a dream that may not be realized because you now want to eat the small animal that you’re supposed to be healing.
When she turns into a werewolf, her new love interest takes her to the vet?
After the untimely death of her husband, a veterinarian struggles to create a new life for herself in Seattle — only to have everything go off the rails when a vicious attack awakens her werewolf heritage.
I like this one, because I like the idea of the vet’s life being complicated by being a werewolf. I did not particularly care for including the suicide in the logline, because I feel you might have one strike against her being a sympathetic character if you put that right up front, before we know and like her.
I also like the idea that you mentioned in comments on the other entry: “turning into a werewolf is a pain in the ass for anyone who wants to live a normal life in a modern American city.” I think that would really highlight the differences of your book if you worked that into your pitch.
After the death of her husband, a veterinarian struggles to create a new life for herself in Seattle — only to have her growing practice derailed when a vicious attack awakens her violent werewolf heritage.
I don’t know if it needs to be worked into the concept/pitch, but I am starting to be attached to the idea that she was raised on a rural family compound by one of those crazy-religious families with a million children, like the Duggars. And maybe she’s a vet because that was one of the few professions that her homeschooled upbringing really prepared her for.
In case you haven’t seen it, check out No Longer Quivering, a blog by an ex-one-of-those-crazy-religious-types. It’s actually several women, but the main woman blows me away with her honesty and intelligence.
Wow.
I want to avoid eviscerations that seem like too much like wish-fulfillment, but now I’m seriously tempted to have her go back to the family compound and eat everybody there.
Heh. Maybe not, since it seems like a lot of those people are good people who are just trapped in a belief system they either don’t know is bad for them, or don’t know how they can get out. You could probably actually draw some parallels with being a werewolf, especially if it’s a family thing. They’re both potentially negative things that provide a sense of structure (family/pack), patriarchy and purpose. (And also can make a lot of bitter, angsty ex-members!)
Yeah, one reason I liked the family compound idea was the way it made a neat comparison/contrast with the werewolf family. And brought in some interesting ideas about violence and what makes a person a monster.
Plus, it provided a circular conflict, where this thing that she thinks is entirely behind her comes back into play, which is a motif that I like. I had been struggling for a way to have her family background work itself into the plot, and until this I had been going with the confrontation with mom over the fact that her mom lied to her about where she came from, plus a few unhappy memories of her childhood. Which wasn’t actually very exciting.
The violent discipline and extravagant deceptions common to those kinds of families makes the same basic type of conflict a lot more interesting to write. And, I hope, to read.
What a novel idea! *grin* (And um, casually clicking on the link in the post above was STILL weird for me.)
It must be really strange to personally know people involved in such a horrible thing.
“Turning into a werewolf is a pain in the ass for anyone who wants to live a normal life in a modern American city.”
As I read tinaconnolly’s post, I realized – that’s it. That’s sentence #1 of your pitch. Now follow it with sentence #2 of your choice.
“Finding out you’re a werewolf would be a pain in the ass for anyone trying to live a normal life in a modern American city – especially if you’re a struggling vet whose patients now smell like dinner.”
“For a grieving young widow who can barely face her normal life’s problems, transforming into a werewolf just makes things go from bad to worse.”
Both of those need work, but I think that they both have promise, and I think you can end up with a great pitch by putting that idea (the inconvenience of being a werewolf) up front.
“Ordinary life is hard. Ordinary life as a werewolf is impossible.”
“Finding out you’re a werewolf would be a pain in the ass for anyone trying to live a normal life in a modern American city – especially if you’re a struggling vet whose patients now smell like dinner. For a grieving young widow who can barely face her normal life’s problems, transforming into a werewolf just makes things go from bad to worse.”
Yes. This.