Killing the writing that doesn't match my log line

The first draft of my novel is so flawed that I plan to read 101 writing books, blog about them for at least a year and then maybe sign up for some therapy in order to fix it.  But if I'm going to pinpoint my first draft's biggest wound, the one that would cause the most pain for its reader, I'm need to discuss log lines.

What is a log or story line? It's that one sentence that nails what your book is all about. It's the line that you would recite to an agent if you meet one in an elevator. 

So what if you don't have one? According to Writing Fiction for Dummies  by Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy that might be OK .  You just won't be publishing your book by reciting one line.    But, beware, if you are lucky enough to be published and haven't thought of a story line,  you will be given several because everyone, from your agent to your marketer, will think of one for you and they all might be different.


There is another reason to write a log line.  According to Ingermanson and Economy, the main reason to write a storyline is "that it can serve to focus your own creative efforts during the arduous months when you're planning and writing your novel." p.136 I completely agree. For me, the process of creating my novel's log line was as important than the log line itself.

After reading Writing Fiction for Dummies,  I sat down to write a log line for my story.  The sad truth was that even my initial efforts  didn't match what I had written so far.  I wanted The Sea Knife to be about family and relationship boundaries, particularly in a divorce situation, but in my first draft, my  protagonist, Kristian, dealt more with his nightmares than his parents.  There were other distractions in the draft as well:  a female character who spent chapters needing Kristian's comfort, carefully edited paragraphs about Kristian's difficulty learning Finnish (hey, it is a damned hard language to learn) and another supporting character whose narrative arc merited its own book and theme.

So here is my current logline:


In order to find a magical object that may save his parents from divorce, a popular high school student uses his new found and fragile ability to influence monsters' minds.

 

This is about the 10th , no 11th, no 20th  (I just changed it again) attempt at a log line.  I expect that there might be others in the future.  But I don't mind thinking of them.  It really keeps me centered.