How to write a better logline

Almost every single time I read a logline someone posts for notes, I ask the same question: "What does your protagonist do?"

People always make the same mistake. They give the setup, not the plot.

For example: "When a group of kids take a vacation at a cabin in the middle of nowhere, they awaken an ancient evil that wants to kill them all."

Okay, that's act one, then what? Because right now, which movie am I describing? Cabin in the Woods? Evil Dead? Dead Snow? I bet you can think of others that fit this logline. It's too generic. Pass.

A logline tells me what I'm watching for two hours, not just the first act. It needs to tell me what this story is about in an interesting way, a way that makes me want to see how you pull it off. If all you give me is Act One, it sounds like a million other movies I've seen.

It also doesn't tell me what people DO. What do these kids do? Is it simply about escape, as in Dead Snow? Do they try to kill the evil, like in Evil Dead? Is it a mystery to solve, like in Cabin in the Woods? Am I going to watch a teenage slasher movie, or a movie where the kids turn it around on the bad guy? I need to know these things if I'm going to get interested.

So a better logline would be "When a group of teenage friends unlocks an ancient evil hidden in the basement of their isolated cabin, they must find a way to kill it before it forces them kill each other."

Now you know which movie I'm talking about, right?

It still sounds like a cheesy B horror flick, but at least this time it adds something different. I'm not just going to be watching kids track and kill an ancient evil, I'm going to be watching kids try to kill each other, people who used to be their friends. There's suggested interpersonal conflict there. I also now see a goal. I know what I'm rooting for - they have to destroy the evil. Now I've got a reason to read it.

My point is, if you want someone to read your script, you have to give them enough information to want to read your script. Make it sound irresistible. Don't worry about spoiling the ending. Nobody's going to get to that great ending if they don't see a reason to read your story.

Making your script stand out

My former manager told me once that she generally gets 10 queries a day. I know reps who get way more than that, and as you can imagine, most of them are terrible. It's not enough to have a good script, you have to let the person reading your query WANT to read that script. She could be reading 30 queries in a row at the end of a very long day - what makes yours jump out at her?

I have a lot of problems when I write, but this has not been one of them for a very long time. I'm good at getting read. Whether I live up to the read - that's a different issue.

I'm not above providing my own examples, so here's the logline for Nice Girls Don't Kill:  

When a meek and universally abused copy editor is mistaken for the professional killer she accidentally bumped off, she decides to take on this violent new identity until the killer turns out to be not so dead, and very pissed off.

This logline has served me very well. I wish they were all this easy to write, by the way. Usually it takes me ages to figure out the right logline, but this one just poured out. When I'm done sending out queries, I'll post my whole thing.

If you've never read this article by Christopher Lockhart on constructing the perfect logline, read it now. He says it better than I ever could.

Mainly, though, I was thinking about concept. Just yesterday a few writing colleagues were discussing the "hook" in your concept. One of the writers was expressing his frustration with figuring out what a hook is.

A hook is the thing that makes your script sound new - like something I'm going to enjoy as a reader.

One of the writers mentioned the Bourne series. There's been a million assassination movies, but here's one about an assassin with amnesia. And there's your hook.

Of course, you may remind everyone about The Long Kiss Goodnight, which had the same premise, except she also had a husband and kid so it was a slightly different hook.

So here's an example of a generic logline you see over and over:


When a former CIA agent is framed for murder, he must find the killer before he's the next one to end up dead.

I made that logline up, but it's based on a multitude of similar loglines I've seen over the years. We've seen this story. It's old news, and it's the same story half the screenwriters in town are telling.

When you see that logline, who do you picture as the protagonist? A white male, right? Maybe 30s, early 40s? In good health? Well educated? Trained in tactics?

Change some of that.

Three Days of the Condor was about a white man in his 30s in good health, educated, all that, except he was not remotely trained in tactics. The guy reads books for a living. There's your hook.

North by Northwest was about a guy who not only wasn't trained in tactics, but he wasn't trained in anything. He was an advertising exec, for heaven's sake.

Enemy of the State was about a black guy who wasn't trained in anything.

La Femme Nikita was about a female street criminal.

What if your protagonist was deaf? Gay? Fifteen? Ninety? An illegal immigrant? A dog?

Suddenly your story changes and bends and starts to develop a hook. What if your story takes place in an unusual location or during a major event? What if your antagonist is deaf or gay or fifteen or ninety?

You can take a generic idea and fiddle around with the details until what was a boring old idea turns into something any reader would like to see.

Loglines for kids

Every year, the National Endowment for the Arts hosts The Big Read, a program where kids all over the country read the same book and participate in related events. Last year it was 11th grade and The Maltese Falcon, prompting me to spend a semester on film noir. This year it's a collection of 20 Mexican short stories published specifically for this year's Big Read.

The good thing about that is that the kids like it. We're the first class reading the book at our school, so they're excited to think almost nobody else has read this book, and they LOVE reading Mexican literature because almost all of them are Latino. The downside is there isn't a whole lot of information on these stories as a collection. Several of them I'm able to look up and research, but for the most part I have to do a lot of the prep work myself. Not that I mind, because I'm having fun learning, but it involves a lot of staying after school in my room and working.

I decided that since we just finished reading a novel as a class, I'd let the kids handle the stories on their own. We read Octavio Paz "My Life with the Wave" as a group, and now they're going to split into groups and each group will take either one long story or two shorter stories and research and present them to the class.

In order to help them choose, I had to go through each story one by one, count page numbers, and create a logline. That was the learning part, creating the loglines. I had to come up with one sentence that summed up the story but kept it sounding interesting enough that the kids would want to read it.

"After a man buys the statue of an Aztec god, his life changes for the worse as the god gets progressively stronger" sounds interesting. "Philosopher Pao Cheng thinks about existence" does not.

It's a challenge, because I want these kids to want to read the stories, but some of them leave me not much to work with. One of the stories is 2 pages long and describes the process of shooting a deer. My logline: "A hunting story." What else am I supposed to do with that?

Then there's tone. Some of the stories are serious and some comical, and I want to give the kids an idea of which is which. So "A man ponders his relationship with a large, quirky woman" is what I went with for the story about the guy who dates an obese lady he thinks is kind of nuts. I figure throwing in "large" and "quirky" do the trick to indicate tone.

Then there's the combination. One of the stories is an employee in a train station just talking and talking in this absurdist voice to a guy who just wants to board his train. I had to figure out how to make it sound both interesting and comical, when all I really had was straight dialogue, mostly one-sided. This is what I went with: "A train station employee explains to a perplexed traveler why he can’t go to T. despite having a perfectly good ticket."

My point here is, if you ever want to practice writing loglines, get a book of short stories and try to create a logline that would make a teenager interested. It's not as easy as it sounds.