For as long as I’ve loved to write stories, I have absolutely hated pitching. It’s a completely different skill, and I hate talking up my work (more precisely, I love talking about what excites me about it, I hate telling anyone else why they should think my work is good). And while synopses might have dulled that excitement more before I learned the right way to do those, loglines were the more exhausting part of the pitch process. Crafting the perfect logline consumes an abnormal amount of work, because it’s an attempt to stuff 90 minutes of meaning into half a paragraph without losing the importance. Presumably, if a story mattered enough for you to labor over writing it, it matters enough that you will agonize over whether people will understand the meaning of those few words in the context of larger theme and resonance.
Stop it.
That’s how I used to think, and it is wrong. Truth is, a logline is the most abstract version of your story. The only thing that should be in there is the hook. A logline no more depicts your story than a child’s drawing of a car depicts its technical structure. It’s going to have a vague Tetris shape and two wheels, some windows if it’s any good. Maybe even doors (with handles!) to make it primo. You get all that, now you’ve got the idea of a car.
Using a simple logline formula doesn’t make your story itself sound formulaic
Now for the good news. At that low-res view, most stories have the same Hegelian structure. Character goes from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Unless you wrote Ulysses, you’re telling the tale of change.*
*I’m kicking around the idea of a character who is rewarded for NOT changing, and defending traditional values, but I’m not ready to jam it in here, and it deserves its own post. For an action or superhero movie (which are both at-large westerns in which a lone figure takes on a sequence of bad men to restore tranquility), you may see less character change and more defense of status quo, but even so, Captain America’s going to be capable of something by the end that he wasn’t before. It’s a theory in formation. I mean, this is a common and ancient type of story that definitely exists. I just want to graph some of the ways they mirror each other, and muse on how the superhero so well represents both of these types of story, vis-a-vis DC creating icons/gods, whereas Marvel creates very human, flawed mortals. Marvel movies tend to be about old men opposing young ones from changing the world for the better. DC, when it works, is more about demigods and gods accepting their role in the (preter)natural order. Classic vs new. Tradition vs. change. Coke vs. Pepsi. So let’s just stick to the commonly accepted hero’s journey we’re all familiar with here.
It just has to be 1-2 sentences. Look, I’ll get you started with a Mad Lib:
A flawed character must undergo a journey they would never choose when point of no return changes their whole world in a way that directly tests their flaw. To overcome it, they will have to do something their flaw previously would not permit them to do.
That’s it! You’re already a qualified Hollywood hack if you can write that. If you wedge their want in there atop their need, you’ve gone pro! Stop worrying about whether it works or not, and just submit the least effort that technically qualifies. We’ll tweak it live.
Every story, or at least the ones that get produced or published for mass-market consumption, is that broad. The logline is not actually your tale, it’s a caricature of your tale, the same way an online character generator makes you look like a Simpsons character. Pick your nose, your eyes, your hair, and there you go. You’re not trying to portray your story’s soul, you’re trying to create an avatar that resembles its appearance.
A logline’s only function is to describe the forces at play that compel a character. Wants, fears, weaknesses, strengths, needs, risks…pushes and pulls. I promise you their importance will come through, and none of us is a talented enough writer to make such things trite in one sentence.
How to add some extra depth to your logline (if you must)
I’m personally of the opinion that a functional logline secretly contains its aphorism. The logline for Wizard of Oz would describe “There’s no place like home,” for example:
When Dorothy Gale runs away from home to save her dog, she ends up transported to a fantasy land called Oz, where a witch pursues her and her new friends. As she learns to assert herself, her newfound skills will be crucial in convincing the wizard to help her return to the family she sorely misses.
Now that’s the movie, at any rate. I seem to recall having a kids’ illustrated copy of the book as a child where Dorothy feels all of Kansas is sun-bleached and devoid of vitality, and staring at Aunt Em’s hands, there’s a fear that if she stays at home she too will end up dried out by the harsh existence.
It’s a crap logline that I would edit into shape if my dog weren’t destroying the living room as I rush to complete this post, but as far as satisfying the technical requirements, I can consider this description of the movie finished. Tomorrow I’ll edit with ease, as it fulfills the purpose and I won’t lose hours getting it where it finally needs to be. Perfecting it will just be about breathing life into it rather than squeezing and making hard cuts.
Probably a good place for a disclaimer that I haven’t sold anything, and you should trust people who have over me. I’m just telling you, as someone who’s dwelled in the mistakes for decades, what I’m doing differently to speed the process and get back to writing without unease.
For tomorrow’s edits, I think it’s important we explain why Dorothy ran away from home, because she’s trying to resolve her immediate problem of Toto being taken away and even put down.
(Heh, I just consulted with my beloved copy of The Nutshell Technique, and Jill Chamberlain says the flaw is indeed that Dorothy runs from her problems. Jill doesn’t nutshell the movie itself, but I’m wondering if she’d call conflict-avoidant Dorothy’s actual flaw, or a symptom of the flaw. I’d put $5 on the latter. Hey, not all movies nutshell perfectly.)
How to give your logline symmetry to show character journey
I’ve also seen it said the best way to tackle a logline is to imply or state the internal conflict as a reflection of the external one:
John McClane must face the terrorists of Nakatomi Plaza to save his wife, but doing so will force him to face what he values/fears/wants to save in his MARRIAGE!
So a film like Finding Nemo would describe the relationship between the personal crisis of its protagonist and the larger story like so:
An overprotective father clownfish finds his worst fears come true when his only surviving son is taken by reef divers. He undertakes a perilous journey to rescue his disabled son, but must take every risk to do so.
“Must risk everything” is so broad you could apply it to damn near any logline, but wait for me on this point…
Finding Nemo is a great movie, and if you don’t like it, you can get off my lawn. I’m tearing up just thinking about Act I. By the end of that sequence, of course Marlin is overprotective. He has lost everything in the world except this one remaining piece. The world is full of horrible things that can strike at any moment, and Marlin learned this in the most awful way possible. To top it off, Nemo’s got an underdeveloped fin that makes it more difficult to evade predators like the one that took his family. We may disagree with Marlin’s helicopter parenting, but we can’t disapprove of it.
But it is this exact flaw that drags Marlin into the state he feared most. He doesn’t give Nemo space to grow, and so the kid rebels. Because he pushes into dangerous territory, he’s taken where Marlin can’t get to him on dry land.
So, back to “take every risk.” Here it’s a quite precise description of Marlin’s growth. Because nothing is more important than Nemo, Marlin is hucked into shark territory, naval mines, the dark and crushing depths, anglerfish chases…you name a terror of the sea, it’s in there. And the most important one is the jellyfish gauntlet. Because Marlin and Dory were warned. They were given solid directions, but Marlin wanted to take…
The safer route.
And the safer route was not, sir, safer at all. His friend was rendered comatose by it. He himself sustained painful injuries. Even after all this hullabaloo, Marlin is being overly cautious. And here he learns that he doesn’t know everything, he doesn’t know what safe always looks like. He should have trusted and he should have listened. All those other dangers got him this far, this fast, but they proved him right. The world was scary and murderous. But here he let his fears blind him to helpful strangers, and now the only way forward is to take the least-safe path. So when he wakes up with Crush, he’s finally open to the surfer zen parenting advice.
As much as Nemo’s a rambunctious kid who’s fun to watch, he’s not the protagonist, he’s the maguffin. He sets out to prove his independence, and it goes badly for him at first, but it’s exactly what he does. He overcomes a lack of confidence, but that’s not really his flaw in the Protagonist’s Journey sense. The trait that got him into the plot of this film was not a lack of confidence but an abundance, pushing boundaries to establish his freedom from Marlin’s auspices. He only thinks there are things he can’t do because Marlin’s told him that, and he does some B-plot growth learning and growing his true capabilities. Nemo progresses to believing in himself, but it’s a straight line despite some obstacles.
Marlin’s growth demands he fundamentally change who he is. When it’s time to escape, Nemo has to be brave and strong, but more importantly, as they’re reunited, Marlin has to have faith in Nemo to be brave and strong. Marlin has Nemo back. They could leave! But that would be tragedy, as they abandon Dory, who has been a true friend. Marlin would be clinging to overprotectiveness and Nemo safe at any cost. Instead, having risked everything to get Nemo back, Marlin sends his son into the heart of peril.
The kid enters a net and risks being scooped right out of the ocean again, but to swifter doom this time. He’s showing his dad that he can lead, that he’s smart, that he has these qualities that will keep him safe. It’s a great union of A and B stories. After all, Nemo escaped the tank, the pipe, and reunited with Dory. We could just end the film if the real story were to see Nemo home to safety. But what’s important, and why this scene exists, is that Marlin believes in his son now. He’s overcome the overprotectiveness that stymied Nemo’s growth, and now he wants his child to be all that he can be, even if that comes with risks. He’s learned there is no safe bubble so it’s better to raise a child to be able to cope and overcome hazards.
And that’s it, really. A great logline tells who your character is, what they’re moving from and towards, and what stands in their way. It offers an external conflict in light of an internal one. And if you struggle to name those things, it’s possible that the story, not the logline, needs fixing. But when it goes right, it can illuminate a lot about your protagonist.
Now try your own logline for Elf, and here’s a tip: Buddy is basically the same at the end as the beginning.