#paul chitlik
Yes, loglines are easy. If you write them first.
Logline instructions usually include describing the protagonist, his challenge, and the course he takes to accomplish his goal. It is often recommended that you describe the antagonist as well.
That should all be wrapped up in one tidy sentence that indicates tone and genre, polished up all shiny and sexy enough to pop off the page. A whole trailer, right there, in twenty words or less.
If you can’t do that, it isn’t because you’re bad at loglines.
Logline problems are really story problems. A story that resists being loglined has not been wrestled to the ground yet. It isn’t sharply focused and you probably don’t have a steeply escalating second act.
My first writing teacher at UCLA, Paul Chitlik, who is wonderful and wrote a wonderful book which I highly recommend, Rewrite, starts with weeks of logline development. Because…
It is incredibly easy to identify the weaknesses in your story before you’ve spent twelve weeks writing it.
If writing your logline feels like herding cats, stop what you’re doing and go back to your story. Is it about someone who has no choice but to do something very difficult that he is uniquely unsuited to do? What is his plan to do it?
- Long ago in a galaxy far away, a simple farm boy must train as a Jedi warrior to defeat an evil empire.
If your logline is more like, “A high school football player moves to a small town to live with his grandmother and struggles to be accepted at his new school.”, I can tell that your story isn’t clear to you yet, because it should be way more specific than that.
- A high school football star has to join the cheerleading squad to protect his sports scholarship.
- A high school football star falls for a nerd girl and has to become valedictorian to follow her to an Ivy League college.
Specific, rather than atmospheric. If you nail down your logline BEFORE you write, it won’t bite you in the butt later.
