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Lesson catalog

Professional Preparation

The logline that actually earns a read

6 min

Fixes this hazard: The premise is hard to summarise, or the pitch describes plot rather than hook.

Repairs: Marketability & Audience Connection · Concept & Premise · Professional Readiness

A logline is not a synopsis. It is one sentence that makes a stranger want to spend two hours with your story: a flawed protagonist, an inciting event, a clear goal, and the thing standing in the way — with the irony visible.

The irony is what most drafts lose. 'A detective hunts a killer' is a category. 'A detective with no short-term memory hunts his wife's killer' is a movie, because the obstacle is fused to the character.

If the logline is hard to write, that is diagnostic information about the screenplay, not about your writing of loglines. A premise you cannot state in a sentence usually has two competing engines, and readers will feel the split long before they can name it.

Then match it to the market honestly. Know the three produced films closest to yours, what they cost, and who made them. Targeted queries to producers who make your kind of film outperform mass submissions by an enormous margin.

HOW TO RUN IT

Assemble the sentence

  • Adjective + protagonist (the flaw that matters, not their job alone).
  • The inciting event, in the active voice.
  • The goal, with a clock or a limit if the story has one.
  • The obstacle, chosen so that only this character finds it hard.

Test it cold

  • Read it to someone who knows nothing about the script.
  • 'How does that go?' is a pass. 'What happens?' means the hook is missing.
  • Cut to under 35 words without losing the irony.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Before

A woman investigates a conspiracy at the company where she works.

After

A compliance officer who reports every rule-break she sees discovers her own signature on the document that killed twelve people — and has eleven days to expose it before the audit clears her employer.

Flaw, inciting event, clock, and an obstacle only she would find impossible.

The exercises

DO THE WORK HERE

Write your answers with the script open. Everything is saved on this device as you type — nothing is uploaded, and nothing is scored. The point is that the next draft is different from this one.

0/2

Exercise 1

0 words · 12 min

Write your logline in under 35 words with the irony visible.

Count the words. Over 35 usually means two engines again.

Exercise 2

0 words · 10 min

What did the cold reader ask first, and what did you change?

Their first question is the diagnosis.

Saves as you type

The drill

Write your logline in under 35 words with the irony in it. Read it to someone who has not heard about the script. If their first question is 'what happens?' rather than 'how does that go?', keep rewriting.

Test the rewritten draftYour assigned path