“Sell Your Story in a Single Sentence” is by Lane Shefter Bishop and it contains some interesting tid-bits of information that every radio copywriter could use – and I am not kidding about that at all.
This book shows your how to condense down your work to a sentence – and yes – before the grammar and spelling pedantic readers of this post jump all over me – I am using the American spelling as that is what is used throughout the book.
It is pitched at people who work in film and in publishing – and yet I found it highly entertaining and relevant to our industry.
How? It has valuable advice for any serious writer, especially on breaking your book/film/story down into a single sentence pitch.
With practical advice on creating a log line and editing that actually makes a lot of very logical sense.
For example – if you are a writer of a book, and are trying to pitch it to a publisher – or someone you know – how would you talk about it?
The process of simplifying the message down to basic salient points, AND, still being able to make sense of the story – is something that is useful in radio ads – where sometimes, in a creative script – we forgo a part of the story in order to focus in on the action – and this book can help you do it in a way that will still keep your story and action in a format that is useable.
In it’s 224 pages with more than twenty short chapters there are many workbooks with some sample loglines from the simple to the complex (and the complex ones were where I took a lot of inspiration from) and you can work on these to create your own.
I took inspiration from this and simplified a long 60 second script down to a 30 second one – then simplified it down even more to 20 seconds, and was able to still tell the story in a relevant way, and fit the details in for the business.
I thought to myself that it couldn’t be that simple – so I grabbed a different 60 sec script, and tried it again… guess what – it was!
This was especially helpful when the 60 sec ad was running in rotation with the 30 sec version – so listeners would hear both and still be able to follow the action and story.
The editing process was the final part, but using Lane’s techniques to discover the core of the action you want to tell, the protagonist and using drama to tell your story in a complete way – was for me the perfect fit.
I can highly recommend “Sell Your Story in a Single Sentence” is by Lane Shefter Bishop for any copywriter who is doing creative work and wants to hone their script craft some more.
If you want to know more before you part with your hard earned cash to buy the book – here is an interesting podcast interview with Lane Bishop on “The Heart Of Show Business” podcast with Alexia Melocchi. AND here is LANE’s WEBSITE where you can see some of the projects she has worked on.
By the way: I have to say though that I did read this straight after reading “Save The Cat” by Blake Snyder – so maybe my brain was in the right place for this one to make a lot of sense to me.
