Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. There are indeed stories where there are truly two protagonists—and sometimes they are told in alternating chapters. For this scenario to be the case, the two protagonists must be essentially equal in every way. In other words, both characters have to learn just as much through their journey as well as equally motivate the story along its path, while revealing what’s at stake for each of them. Here’s an example of a logline with two equal protagonists:
A man and his sworn enemy must learn to become best friends, to survive being stranded on a dangerous island.
Here, both characters are given equal time in the manuscript and are essentially two halves of the same whole story. Also, they have exactly opposite actions and reactions: What one does affects the other. (Neither of them is the antagonist. The island itself takes on that role, because it’s the dangers inherent there that both of the men have to overcome.) So this unusual story is an exception to the rule, and the logline does indeed indicate two distinct protagonists. I must emphasize, however, that this exact equality between two characters is truly unusual, and most stories have one protagonist for logline purposes.
Here’s yet another scenario for you to think about: While most stories have one protagonist, and every once in a while there’s a story that really does have two protagonists, what if you are dealing with a story with many characters, making up an ensemble? What if you feel that there are multiple protagonists in your story?
Chapter 4
The Group Perspective
I’VE BEEN ASKED IF THERE COULD EVER BE A GROUP OF protagonists in what most people would consider an ensemble story. Usually the answer is no. Even if a group of people are along for a particular journey, typically there is always one who is leading the others from event to event based on his or her decisions. Think about Guardians of the Galaxy, for instance. Peter Quill may have Rocket, Groot, and Gamora all together as an unusual quartet on their crazy adventure, but he is the one motivating the action. His choices propel the movie along through its two-plus hours. It’s the same with The Wizard of Oz. The Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow are all along on Dorothy’s journey—she is the protagonist because it is her desire to get home that propels the story forward. She will be the one trapped without her aunt and uncle if she can’t make it out of Oz and back to their farm in Kansas.
One of the many jobs of the logline is to simplify the through-line or main plot for the audience so that understanding the main selling point of the property is easy to discern. If there are multiple protagonists then that job becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible. Therefore, most of the time, even if there are multiple points of view in the story, the logline can be streamlined to focus only on one lead character (or possibly two, as mentioned in the previous chapter). This is, of course, done simply by asking the questions I posed earlier about whose choices are truly moving the action forward to its conclusion and who has something to lose if he or she fails in reaching whatever the goal is.
That said: Once again, there are exceptions to every rule. One that comes to mind is The Big Bang Theory, which is a true ensemble show. Each episode focuses on a different one of the guys in their smart group of four. If Sheldon and/or Leonard were the only protagonist(s), that would be a different situation, but there are just as many episodes about Howard’s mother and Raj’s perpetual girlfriend search, etc., so the overall show has four equal protagonists. Here’s a very rough draft logline to show how to deal with that situation:
Four geniuses learn from their hot blonde neighbor that there is more to life and love than just science.
All four of the guys acquire knowledge from Penny, either directly or indirectly (through her on-again, off-again relationship with Leonard), that they would never have gotten had they forsaken her friendship and stayed only within their tight group of four. Each week, a different lesson is learned by one of these main characters. Again, this is truly the exception to the rule. In normal circumstances, for most TV programs and feature films, this group protagonist approach does not apply.
Another exception to the rule would be the Garry Marshall romantic comedy film Valentine’s Day. The movie follows a group of different characters and their struggles with regard to both love and the Valentine’s Day holiday. All of the main characters in this ensemble piece get fairly equal screen time and their individual journeys get equal weight through interconnecting stories within the overall feature. Because of this, the logline would again require the group perspective. It might be something like this:
A group of interrelated characters struggle through makeups and breakups due to the pressures associated with Valentine’s Day.
It still needs work, but the necessity for a multiple-protagonist perspective is clear.
I was asked recently about a logline for Game of Thrones (my absolute favorite series on TV right now), and I think that show is the most unusual of all exceptions. The fact that many of the protagonists die in the course of George R. R. Martin’s book series means that creating a logline must necessarily include a group perspective. This is because the protagonists keep changing; as one gets killed, another takes his or her place. It’s a very uncommon but fascinating scenario. Creating the logline for Game of Thrones was a difficult and, believe me, time-consuming process, but since I am always talking about how absolutely anything can be broken down into a solid logline, I was determined to prove that one could be crafted, even with this kind of rare material that has an ever-changing roster of protagonists. My rough draft version looked like this:
Leaders of the Seven Kingdoms fight each other to the death through strategic, bloody, and dragon-filled civil wars, with the goal of becoming “King of the Iron Throne.”
The leaders make up the group of protagonists because Game of Thrones is one of only a handful of book series I know in which most of the main characters die fairly early on and are replaced by others. This is very unusual, however, and I must reiterate that this is a very rare exception to the rule. Nine times out of ten, there is only one solid protagonist for a true logline.
Now that we’ve explored one, two, and even multiple protagonist examples, we finally know who is driving the story forwards. Now we need to determine what is motivating their journey. In other words, what does the protagonist truly want?
Chapter 5
What Does the Protagonist Want?
THE SIMPLE QUESTION OF WHAT THE PROTAGONIST desires, not emotionally but in a solid and concrete fashion, stumps so many writers that I am continuously perplexed by how they can have written a full manuscript without this knowledge firmly cemented in their minds. After all, the main character’s desire is what provides the motivation for the journey that person is on throughout the story. It is what propels them forward as well as what instills urgency and pressure. In Hollywood, we call this force “the ticking clock.” Without this, the protagonist becomes extremely passive, a pawn tossed to and fro from event to event, and these incidents then have no emotional resonance. That is because the character is moving through the story with no particular direction and without active participation in his or her own fate. When a story feels like it has no pacing, it is often because there isn’t a ticking clock.
Many times, when I ask about what a character wants, writers give me grand emotional beats, huge generalizations which range from “he wants to find true love” to “she wants to bring about world peace” to “he wants to expel lifelong anger from his heart.” This may all be true, but none of that is specific enough to become a piece of the logline. While finding true love and expelling anger are certainly valid desires, millions upon millions of characters feel those things. In fact, that’s why so many back-cover blurbs sound the same. Those write-ups tend to focus on large-concept journeys such as saving the world, but neglect to share what specifically it takes to make that happen in the story. Remember, the logline is all about what makes your particular tale and character unique. So lose the broad view and figur
e out what is precisely moving your lead through his or her journey.
I have an amazing project at Fox 2000 Pictures right now, for example, with Peter Chernin as my producing partner, called Reboot. I could never have sold it based on describing just a general “want” for the lead character of Wren. She wants to be human. But what does that really mean?
Wren is the most famous reboot: She came back to life after being dead for an astonishing 178 minutes, which made her a bit robotic. But contrary to what you might think, what she wants is not simply to be human. That’s too broad, too general a desire. What she wants is to regain the memories she had when she was alive (and not yet a reboot). She wants to relearn how to have emotions like humor, sadness, desire, and especially love, in order to overcome the unemotional world she’s been living in since rebooting. Now that’s a powerfully specific want, and it helped me set up the property as a new adaptation, a feature film project.
Here’s an example of a logline that was submitted to me which needed to get rid of the generalization and focus instead on the specific:
ORIGINAL
An American woman’s desire to change the world leads her to a Somalian camp where she teaches two women how to be independent and, ultimately, free.
While changing the world is an admirable goal, it doesn’t work here because it is just too general a concept. Think about how many stories involve that topic; the list is endless. Therefore, it’s necessary to become laser-focused on the American’s specific goal, the thing she does which drives the story forward and also, of course, holds the most inherent drama: Always remember, you are selling, selling, selling.
In talking further with the content writer, it became clear to me that her protagonist’s journey was definitely not defined by the ever-so-general “desire to change the world.” In fact, the American woman’s true motivation is listed in the original logline, but not until the very end—what I consider burying the lede. Her true aim in the story, as it turned out, was to free these Somalian women from their circumstances (horrifically bad marriages), at great risk to herself. So, keeping in mind what the protagonist really wants and being as specific as possible throughout, here’s the redo:
REDO
An American risks her own life to free two highly oppressed and abused Somalian women from their prison-like marriages.
Now we understand that her pursuit of freeing the Somalian women is what is motivating her actions throughout the story, and the danger to her in doing so is clear. Her journey is very easily defined in this version, because the Somalian women’s freedom is specifically what she wants to achieve—rather than the broad “desire to change the world.” And, of course, in trying to achieve that goal, she is putting her own life at risk.
Sometimes, a writer’s understanding of what his or her character wants isn’t too general, it’s just fixated on the wrong details. In other words, the person’s desire is directed toward something that isn’t actually propelling him or her through the story. Here’s an example in which the protagonist’s goal needs to be restructured and redefined:
ORIGINAL
A chemist with the world’s most discerning nose must forgo her dream to work in the family’s soybean plant.
First of all, I don’t think that the writer meant that the chemist’s dream was to work in the family soybean plant, but that’s how it currently reads. Secondly, the bummer of having to work at the plant isn’t what’s driving the story forward. What kind of a dramatic journey is expressed with: “Oh, well, bummer, I have to work in my family’s soybean plant?” None. So what does the chemist really want? What is her dream specifically? Again, what is moving the action along from plot point to plot point through the manuscript?
After posing these questions to the content creator, I finally learned the real story, which thankfully also included the answer to why it mattered that she had a discerning nose—she was creating a love potion. This was the dream the original piece was referring to. The tease about her having a dream was unnecessary. I needed to know exactly what the dream was so I could help the writer create a better logline. It’s all about the specifics. Once the focus was shifted to that element, the love potion, the logline suddenly became much clearer and very different:
REDO
When a chemist’s half-baked love-potion perfume is stolen, she must neutralize it before everyone in the world falls in love with someone unsuitable.
The writer never thought about what the chemist actually wanted, which was to create a working love potion. So when the character instead creates a concoction that doesn’t work properly and it gets out, her journey becomes to find a way to fix that nightmare so others won’t suffer the ramifications. Now that we know what the protagonist actually wants, her journey reveals itself.
It’s a huge pet peeve of mine when writers send me supposed loglines like “A woman believed her fear of her past was over but she was wrong.” I have no idea what exactly the woman is afraid of, and because that description sounds like a million other stories I’ve read, I don’t much care. What the protagonist wants—to overcome her past, apparently—is so general, it doesn’t entice me to want to find out more or to learn why this story is worth reading. Defining what the protagonist wants is paramount to creating a logline that will make a reader or viewer intrigued and interested in your particular story.
I remember being on the Sony lot once and bumping into a screenwriter I’d worked with in the past. He seemed a bit down so I asked what was wrong. He admitted that he felt he’d just blown an important meeting because he was asked what was motivating his lead character and he fumbled through a rambling answer. I asked him to tell me about it. His story focused on a female psychologist who was reinventing the way anger management groups were handled. She pioneered a new method for treatment that was poorly received initially, which had caused her loads of grief and stress, and ultimately caused her to almost lose her license.
When I asked what the writer believed was motivating the psychologist through her journey, he said it was her own family issues which caused her to want to rethink how things were done (which is what he had rambled on about in front of the executive). I asked him to be more specific and he said that her brother had had anger management problems that were treated improperly and affected her as a young girl. Yet again, I asked him to be even more specific. What were the issues with the brother and what exactly happened to the two of them as kids?
After much probing, here’s what I came up with for a rough draft logline for the screenwriter, which he then asked to use for his next few pitches because it clearly and concisely explained what was motivating the character:
A psychologist, stabbed by her own brother in childhood, vows to change the way anger management is treated but risks her license with her unorthodox ways.
It’s amazing what a good logline, focusing specifically on what the protagonist wants, can do for both a story and, ultimately, a pitch.
At this point, we have defined who the protagonist is and explored motivations—what they want. But what if the character seems like they don’t know what they want? What if the story is basically one on of self-discovery?
Chapter 6
What If They Don’t Know What They Want?
WHEN A CONTENT CREATOR SAYS TO ME, “WHAT IF MY character doesn’t know what they want—that’s why they are on this adventure,” I immediately suspect that it’s actually the writer who doesn’t know what the protagonist wants. It’s absolutely imperative that the writer figure out that element before finalizing their entire story. Think about it: If you are on a journey with a character who doesn’t know what they want, then why care about the voyage at all? It’s certainly a recipe for slow pacing and rambling prose and not a good way to get someone to read your material.
Recently, when I spoke about deciding what a character wants, I was asked about the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, the 2001 film starring Renée Zellweger. An audience member expressed the opinion that Bri
dget is a character who doesn’t know what she wants, so how do you deal with that? I disagreed with this idea. Bridget knows deep in her heart what she wants: someone to truly love her for who she is. Mark Darcy even states her secret desire when he says at one point in the film that he likes her “just as she is,” and that throws her into turmoil. The reason Bridget seems to not know what she wants is because she just doesn’t know how to actually get it. This is usually the case when it seems as if a character doesn’t know what they want. They probably do know, they just aren’t sure how to achieve it and must try a series of wrong moves to get to the right one.
In Bridget’s case, her pursuit of numerous jobs, different beaux, the self-control to drink less alcohol, and the ever-elusive lighter weight on the scale are all a part of the journey she is on as she propels herself (and the story) toward her ultimate goal: to find the perfect guy who will accept her just the way she is. While these machinations can make it seem like Bridget is somewhat lost, in actuality her process of trial and error provides markers along the path to ultimately getting her what she truly wants. Here’s my very rough draft logline:
A British woman humorously attempts to fix her crazy, messed-up life, hoping it will help her discover her perfect mate before she ends up a spinster.
As you can see, while Bridget may go through a process that seems like she’s searching for what she wants, she’s actually already pursuing her desire (to find Mr. Right), and that is what’s propelling her through one mishap after another in each area of her life.
It’s the same for a piece like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. In James Thurber’s short story, it may seem like Mitty has no idea what he wants because he imagines being a pilot, a surgeon, and even a killer. But what do all of these seemingly random occupations have in common? If you look closely, you’ll find that what Mitty truly wants is to triumph, to have a certain level of success or acclaim in his fantasy life, since he is sadly unable to do so in his real one. That is why he pursues it all so vigilantly. He has one solid goal, which moves the story along through its many fantasy-based experiences.
Sell Your Story in Single Sentence Page 3
