Specifically, the logline provides the content creator with a concise way to focus on the three main anchors of their writing:
Who is the protagonist?
What do they want?
What is at stake?
Most importantly, creating a logline involves figuring out the most unique answers to those questions. By carefully defining and solidifying these three elements and what makes them distinctive early on in the process (by creating a successful logline), the content creator can save hours of rewriting later on down the line. I often say that the logline is sort of like a rudder on a boat—keeping writers on course to where they are going as they weave their tales. Just as you wouldn’t sail a ship without a rudder, you shouldn’t write out your material in full without a logline. Clearly, the payoff is that a successful logline not only sells the creative work upon completion, it also keeps the creator inexorably on-point throughout the process. That’s why I always tell people to try to design their logline first, while they are fleshing out what they want to write, and then get started on the bulk of their masterpiece.
In order to further define what a logline is, let’s take a moment to explore what it is not. First and foremost, let me start by tackling a standard misconception. A logline is not the recitation of one film title meets another film title. This blank-meets-blank shorthand was developed years ago by studio execs in order to pitch their bosses on high-concept films they wanted green-lit. It has since been adopted by others as an uber-quick selling tool but, let me reiterate, this format is not a logline. Personally, I don’t even understand how saying something is “Fantastic Four meets 2001: A Space Odyssey,” for example, helps you sell your specific story. First of all, it says absolutely nothing about your particular piece. Secondly, by referencing those movies you are assuming that the listener knows exactly what you mean by your comparisons, though in actuality there’s a big window for misinterpretation. What if they think you mean your project is like those two films because of the characters, and you actually meant the association to relate to the tone of the film or films? Also, if the listener hasn’t seen one of those movies, you really haven’t helped yourself at all. Lastly, in this type of scenario, you are usually referencing features that did really well in the theater in order to get the listener’s excitement up. By doing that, you’ve raised the bar extremely high right away, and that’s a lot for your personal project to live up to.
Next, a logline is not the back-cover blurb. That write-up is often intentionally vague and only hints as to what the reader can expect the tale to be about. It’s usually a sneak peek at what’s inside the pages of the work. The problem with this “tease” is that it makes the story sound terribly generic, since the specifics of a journey are what make it different. For example, many stories could be classified as “a mother/daughter tale in which they learn to fix their broken relationship through a difficult experience.” That boring description covers a large number of written works, I am sure. But if we learn instead that the mentally disturbed daughter nearly dies from some rare disease that the mom can miraculously fix by giving her own blood to her previously estranged child, it begins to distinguish itself from the other mother/daughter tales. Think about it—how can your story stand out from other properties in the exact same genre if you don’t let your reader know what specifically makes it unique?
Many writers, when told to be much more specific, tell me that they don’t want to “spoil it” by “giving it away.” I always ask them, “Why not? Why not share with everyone the coolest part of your story?” That’s the way to get someone to actually read it. Here’s an example: If I tell you my story is about a gardener who has exceptional abilities, you may be a little bit interested. But if I tell you that my story is about a gardener with magical powers who can influence all wildlife to grow into living artwork, you are sure to be much more intrigued. Additionally, if you tease me with familiar generalities, I will most likely feel like I’ve already read many other similar stories, so why should I bother reading yours? And that’s definitely not the reaction you want as a content creator.
Let me also clarify that a logline is not what you see written on movie posters. Those little blurbs are typically meant to be a kind of a tease that hints at there being something fun or cool or interesting about the project; the goal is to entice you into wanting to go see the film. Think about Titanic, for example. The poster reads: “Nothing on Earth Could Come Between Them.” Does that actually tell you anything at all about the epic love story? Not at all. Dirty Dancing reads: “The Time of Your Life.” Of course, nothing in those five words in any way indicates what the film is about. For Dumb and Dumber, the blurb is: “For Harry and Lloyd, Every Day is a No-Brainer,” which—while very cute—again, doesn’t tell you about the story itself. Those blurbs on the posters may help in the studio marketing team meeting, but they are not in any way loglines.
Next, let me make it abundantly clear that a logline is not a retelling of the entire plot, crammed into one very long run-on sentence. You’d be surprised at how many writers try desperately to make that work, to no avail. I’ve seen some supposed loglines that were absolutely ridiculous: lengthy sentences with dashes and parentheses and all manner of cheats to try to make a one-liner. Aside from the fact that it’s virtually impossible to cram a creative and detailed story into one sentence, why would you want to? If you tell the reader every single thing that happens in your piece, then they don’t need to read your work, and that’s the exact response you don’t want.
Instead, a logline is one sentence that shines a spotlight on the most unique part of your tale—the part that will make someone say, “I want to read that.” Those are the golden words that a successful logline can achieve for you. This book will put you directly and firmly on that path. So let’s start by looking at the three most important questions involved in beginning the creation of the perfect logline.
CHAPTER 2
Who is the Protagonist?
WHO IS THE PROTAGONIST? FOR A WRITER, THIS SEEMS like the most basic of questions. Sometimes, at writers’ conferences, I even get a chuckle from the audience when I bring up this topic. And yet, so many times, writers tell me their entire plot in frustration—not being able to create a solid logline—and I’ll point out that the person or people in their logline don’t seem to be the ones driving the story forward. Suddenly, understanding dawns. While these other characters may be important, they should not be the focus of the logline. None of them are the protagonist.
Often, a character can be a favorite, fabulous in their own right, and thus seemingly important to both writer and plot, but that character is not actually the one motivating the journey and moving the story along from point A to point B to point C. This is difficult for some content creators to understand, because they are jumping ahead to ideas like how cool a character would be if that role were played by a well-known A-list actor, or how much fun that particular character is to write because of a great sense of humor, or no conscience to speak of, or a razor-sharp wit. Those are all things that may be true, but they still don’t make that character the grounded center of the logline.
Sometimes, the toughest thing for writers is that they fall in love with their own material. So for them, every character is important to the story—and in the literary work itself, that’s completely valid. But for our purposes, it’s all about defining who is continuously driving the story onward, which character’s actions are the plot points hinging upon, and who is making decisions that end in scenarios of risk, revealing what’s at stake. Answer these questions and you have your logline’s protagonist.
Here’s an example of a logline that had to tackle this particular demon before it could be created properly.
ORIGINAL
A man discovers that abandoned hospitals are actually time portals and that he can travel to the past and change whatever he wants, but when his assistant finds out what he’s doing, he realizes he has to go back and change things enough to make her d
isappear.
As you can tell, when I was first brought this story, the content creator thought that the boss character was the protagonist, since he was actively adjusting things in time—and the stilted logline the writer had created reflected that. However, in working through the logline and discussing the full plot, it became clear that the woman—the assistant—was actually the lead character in terms of the logline. She was the one with desperate stakes, which motivated her journey: After all, if she didn’t succeed in stopping her boss then her own existence would be wiped out. Here’s the redone version, prior to any vocabulary tweaking and/or finessing:
REDO
A woman procuring abandoned hospitals discovers they’re time portals her boss is using to change the past, and must stop him before he erases her existence.
Now, in this iteration, with the real protagonist defined, we truly feel what’s at stake, and the urgency of the journey comes through loud and clear. That boss character is obviously important to the story: In fact, he’s the antagonist. But in logline creation, it’s important to stay focused on the protagonist, because the protagonist is the one who has something to lose if the journey is not completed in a satisfying way. The protagonist reveals to the reader the most important element and driving force in any story—what is truly at stake.
I find it funny now that the writer and I spent so many hours crafting this logline with the female assistant as the lead, since we ended up drastically changing it later. An executive I deal with at Universal Pictures loved the story but not the female lead, because most of their action-based films have a male in the main role. So the writer and I went back to the drawing board and created a new logline with the initial time jumper—a male mercenary—as the lead (since the boss lets that guy do the first, more dangerous jumps). Of course, the final book manuscript was ultimately adjusted to match. Here’s a draft of the redone logline:
A mercenary performing time jumps via “haunted” hospitals must stop his boss from using the portals to change the past before the man erases his existence.
Notice that the female assistant has been completely removed from the logline. That’s because, for our purposes, she is no longer the protagonist, and therefore an unnecessary element. The initial time jumper/mercenary has now taken on that role. You can see from this example how important it was to define the protagonist first. With the original, rather confused, antagonist-based logline, we could have never successfully made the switch from the female lead to the male lead character’s perspective, as the buyer requested, because the protagonist wasn’t at the forefront.
Here’s another project I had for which the writer provided a logline that focused on the wrong person/people:
ORIGINAL
Three half-angels struggle to protect a half-angel/half-human girl from the devil because it’s the only way to keep the balance between good and evil.
While the concept of half-angels is definitely a cool one, their journey of protecting someone to keep the balance between the amorphous “good” and “evil” just isn’t that exciting. In fact, except for the half-angel concept, it sounds kind of generic, overall. I know from experience that this can happen when the writer has focused on the wrong lead character(s). For our logline purposes, the half-angels are not the protagonists. (We’ll delve into the multiple protagonists issue in just a bit.) I spoke to the writer to get more specifics about the good and evil part of the story and find out why the devil would want this girl in particular—what was at stake. Here’s the redone rough draft logline:
REDO
A half-angel/half-human girl, who’s the last bit of goodness in the world, must destroy the devil or all evil will be unleashed from hell.
If you go back and read the original logline, you’ll see that there is a pretty big difference. That’s because the girl is actually the protagonist, not the other half-angels, which was made clear to me by the fact that simply protecting someone isn’t a very active role, so they couldn’t be the protagonists. It’s now crystal clear that it’s the girl’s much bigger and much more risk-filled journey that we care about—especially now, because the stakes regarding evil taking over the world are more clearly defined. As you’ll find me reiterating many times throughout this book, you can never go wrong by being more specific.
The other reason that defining the protagonist is so important is that this component can play an important role in the marketability of your material. I was at a meeting recently at Paramount Television, what’s commonly referred to as a “meet and greet.” During the meeting, I got to know the executive and he got to know me, but more important, he let me know what types of material the company was looking for. The interesting thing was that the exec defined the different genres they wanted to explore (noir, action, et cetera), but he also emphasized that every project had to have a really interesting character as its base. So, in essence, his interest was less about the type of show (or even the storyline) and more about what type of person was at its core, moving the action along. That protagonist essentially defined the series for him; that’s what he concentrated on in terms of sparking interest. That was great information to have, because then I was able to pitch him a property with a fabulously complex character at its center, starting with the logline, of course. That led to the immediate request for me to email over my full write-up—exactly the response I was hoping for.
Okay, so step number one is determining who the protagonist is. As you’ve seen, while this is a deceptively simple question, it does not always have a simple answer. Now that you have that concept down, I’m going to shake things up a bit. In Hollywood, we call this “throwing rocks” at the character—making everything more difficult.
What do you do if you think you have two protagonists in your story instead of only one?
Chapter 3
What If There Are Two Protagonists?
OCCASIONALLY, I GET ASKED ABOUT HOW TO HANDLE stories told by two protagonists, or material that involves alternating narrators. More often than not in this situation, the content creator thinks there is more than one protagonist when there is really only one. Just because every other chapter in the story is told by a different speaker doesn’t always mean that there are two central characters with regards to the logline. As a writer, you may need both perspectives to tell your tale the way it needs to be told, but those narrators aren’t necessarily dual protagonists, for our purposes.
Here’s an example of a submitted logline where the content creator felt that his story had two protagonists:
ORIGINAL
A boy and his brother inadvertently discover the ghost of a murdered blind girl, and the two must prove who did it so justice can be done.
I spent quite a bit of time asking the writer if the brother was just as integral to the story as the boy himself: Did they both explore the locations together? Discover the girl together? Eventually, it became clear that while they did pursue much of the plot in tandem, it was really the original boy making the decisions about when they did what and how. The brother was there only because it turned out that their mother was actually the killer (and, by the way, that’s a nifty revelation that should be solidly included in the logline itself). In the end, the brother is not one of two protagonists in our logline because he’s not making the choices which move the story forward. Here’s the rough redo:
REDO
A boy discovers the ghost of a murdered blind girl and must prove his own mother was the killer.
Notice that, with one of the two brothers removed, the sentence has more focus and power. Always remember: It’s never as interesting if two people are doing the exact same thing. By taking one away, you have just streamlined and defined who your audience should care about, be rooting for, and want to follow on the journey. This clean and clear understanding is an important element in connecting with readers, getting their attention, and keeping it. Since that is your ultimate goal, why not use everything at your disposal to help make it happen?
First instinct might tell you that it is Typhoid Mary, since she’s the main subject of the spooky tale. But we had to ask ourselves: Do Mary’s decisions move the story along? Is she the one with high stakes? The answer is no. It’s the girl she’s after. That girl decides to go out with her friends to a scary island. There, she decides to explore dilapidated buildings. Her ancestry brings the wrath of Mary upon her, and it’s her life that is at stake if she does not defeat Typhoid Mary. So the girl is our protagonist and Mary is actually our antagonist. Here’s the rough draft logline:
A girl discovers that Typhoid Mary is alive, seeking vengeance upon her, and must find a way to escape the woman’s deadly island.
As you can see, while Mary is without a doubt an important part of the logline, there is only one protagonist here: the girl who must flee to save her own skin. She is the one who has something to lose if she fails—her life.
Recently, I was asked about the musical Wicked, which the writer thought was a good example of a story with two protagonists. During the course of the musical, both Glinda and Elphaba feel like they have equal stage time. However, for logline purposes, I would say that there is actually only one protagonist. Why? Because it is Elphaba who is truly taking us on her journey. She’s the one who changes the most, and has to learn the lesson that trying to adjust herself to be someone she’s not will never serve her. It is her character arc, consisting of coming into her own and accepting herself for who she really is, which propels the plot of the story forward throughout the musical. Glinda is just helping her along.
Sell Your Story in Single Sentence Page 2
