How to Write a Logline That Actually Sells the Script

Four elements, no exceptions

Strip any working logline and you find the same four parts: a specific protagonist, an active want, a force of resistance, and a cost of failure. Miss one and the sentence goes soft in a way readers feel instantly, even when they cannot name it.

Specific does not mean named. It means characterised: the burned-out storm chaser, the disgraced pediatric surgeon, the last translator in a dying town. One detail that shapes how they will make choices.

• Protagonist with a defining detail
• A want they actively pursue
• Resistance with its own logic
• A price for failing

The five that kill it

These show up in the majority of loglines we grade, and each one is repairable in a single pass.

• Passive protagonist: things happen to them rather than because of them.
• Mystery-box vagueness: "a dark secret", "a shocking discovery" — withholding is not intrigue.
• Two sentences of setup and none of conflict.
• Theme instead of plot: what it is about rather than what happens.
• Genre confusion: the tone of the sentence promises a film the script does not deliver.

Build it in four moves

Write the four elements as four fragments on separate lines. Do not connect them yet. Then join them with "when", "must" and "or" — the joints of nearly every logline that works. Read it aloud. If you run out of breath, one element is doing too much work. Trim the adjectives before you trim any of the four parts.

Test it against a cold reader

You cannot grade your own logline, because you already know the film. The free Logline Lab reads it the way a stranger would and scores hook, clarity and stakes out of ten, then hands back a rewrite built only from the elements you supplied. It takes about thirty seconds and no account.