How to Write a Logline That Sells Your Script

The working method: five moves, in this order

Do not write a logline as a sentence. Build it as five decisions, in this order, and only turn it into prose at the end. The order is the method: each move removes a choice you would otherwise make by instinct, which is how loglines become vague.

1. Write the ending first

Before the logline, write one line describing the final scene: who decides what, and what it costs them. The ending is the answer to the question the logline poses, so without it you are guessing at what your protagonist actually wanted. You will not put this line in the logline — you use it to work out which want was the real one.

LAST SCENE: the pilot signs the confession that clears his crew
and takes his own licence with it.

That single line gives you the irony of the whole film: saving them means convicting himself. You could not have written the good logline without it.

2. Name the want as a verb with an object

A want has to be something a camera could see happen. Abstract nouns are the most common failure in first drafts, because they describe the story's meaning rather than its action.

Abstract:  ...who wants redemption and a fresh start.
Filmable: ...who must clear his old crew's names before the inquiry
           closes on Friday.

The test is simple: can you point a camera at it? 'Clear their names' happens in a room with a signature in it. 'Redemption' happens nowhere.

3. Name the obstacle as a person with a plan

Opposition needs intent, resources and at least one move it is willing to make. A vague threat cannot escalate, so a logline built on one has no second half. Give the obstacle a name, a reason and a method.

Weak:     ...but the investigation is closing in.
Stronger: ...against a shipping magnate who needs a scapegoat and has
the harbour master on his payroll.

If your script genuinely has no antagonist, the obstacle still has to push back with something: a deadline, an institution, a diagnosis, or the protagonist's own flaw stated as a task. The test is whether the obstacle can take a turn the protagonist did not plan for.

4. Add the irony

Irony is the clause that makes a stranger care, because it creates a question the sentence cannot answer. It usually comes from one of four places: the person they must trust is the one who ruined them; the skill they are proud of is what caused the problem; the thing they have refused their whole life is the only way through; or success costs them the very thing they are fighting for.

...although the only evidence that saves them convicts him.

This is the clause most writers cut for length, and it is the last thing you should cut. A logline with four slots and no irony is a situation report.

5. Cut it to one sentence

Cut in this order, and stop when you are inside the word count: backstory clauses first, adjectives describing quality second, proper nouns third, adverbs last. Then read it aloud once. If you run out of breath, the sentence is still carrying something the reader does not need.

Here is the same story through all five moves. The word counts are the point — the idea does not change, only the information does.

Draft 1 — 31 words
DEAD RECKONING. A story about a harbour pilot who is forced to
confront his past when his old crew is arrested, and he has to decide
what he really cares about.

Draft 2 — 18 words
A harbour pilot must clear his old crew's names after they are
arrested for a wreck he caused.

Draft 3 — 27 words
A disgraced harbour pilot must clear his old crew's names after they
are arrested for a wreck he caused, against a shipping magnate who
needs a scapegoat.

Draft 4 — 36 words
When his old crew is arrested for a wreck he caused, a disgraced
harbour pilot must clear their names against a shipping magnate who
needs a scapegoat, although the only evidence that saves them
convicts him.

Draft 1 is thirty-one words that contain no story: a title, an announcement, a passive protagonist and a theme. Draft 4 is thirty-six words that contain the inciting incident, the protagonist with history, the goal, the opposing force and the cost of success. The second version is longer and much shorter to read.

Aim for 25 to 50 words

The working range is 25 to 50 words in one sentence, and most loglines that get a script requested sit between 30 and 40. That is roughly what a listener absorbs in one breath during a pitch, and roughly what fits in the logline field of a contest form without the reader having to scroll.

Count the words before you decide anything else. Writers consistently underestimate their own loglines by ten to fifteen words, and the number is the only honest signal you have about whether a reader will finish the sentence with attention left for your script.

One convention worth knowing: hyphenated compounds ('nine-year-old', 'self-taught') count as one word, and so does a solid industry term like 'rom-com'. Do not game the count by hyphenating; readers experience the sentence as a rhythm, not as a word count.

Use active voice, present tense, and verbs that move

Active voice is not a style preference in a logline; it is how the reader works out who is driving the story. If the protagonist is not the grammatical subject of the main verb, the reader has to reconstruct the agency, and most readers will not bother.

Present tense is the convention even for historical stories: 'A Victorian surgeon must...' reads as current because the reader is inside the film while reading, not looking back at it. Marketing copy often writes in the future tense — 'one woman is about to discover' — and that is the one place the habit belongs.

Two cautions. Use 'must' at most once; three 'must' clauses in one sentence is the sound of a formula showing through. And avoid stacking two verbs in the same clause ('must race to stop the killer before he strikes') — that construction usually means the sentence is trying to carry the second act as well as the first.

Why 'we follow' and 'a story about' are filler

'We follow a young detective as she...' contains three words that carry no information: we follow describes the act of watching, not the story, and it puts the protagonist in the object position where she can no longer do anything. 'A story about' spends four words announcing that a story exists.

The cost is not just length. Both phrases delay the protagonist, and the first five words of a logline are the only ones a reader is guaranteed to read with full attention.

Here is the saving on one sentence. The first version is 44 words and says less:

Before — 44 words
A story about a night porter in a strange hotel, and we follow him as
he begins to suspect that something is wrong with the guests, in a
film that explores themes of grief, guilt and the stories we tell
ourselves to keep working.

After — 29 words
When a grieving night porter finds his own name in tomorrow's checkout
ledger, he must identify the guest doing the killing before his shift
ends, or he is next.

Every word removed was a word about the telling. Nothing was removed about the story, because the first version never got to the story.

The protagonist-adjective trick

One precise descriptor does the work of a paragraph of backstory. The trick is to choose an adjective or a noun phrase that names a debt, a loss or a contradiction rather than a quality, because a quality tells the reader what to think and a debt tells them what to expect.

Notice that the sharper column is usually a job plus a history. Precise professions do quiet structural work: a harbour pilot can be blamed for a wreck, a forensic accountant can read handwriting, a night porter has keys and a shift that ends. Choose the job that makes your plot inevitable rather than the job that sounds cool.

This is a contested area, so know both positions. Some working readers find stacked descriptors — 'a brilliant but self-destructive ex-cop' — to be the signature of an amateur logline, and they are right when the adjectives are complimentary. Others want the flaw stated up front because it is the engine of the character. The dominant practice is one descriptor, and if the flaw matters, put it in a clause with a fact in it: 'who has not spoken to his daughter in six years' tells the reader more than 'troubled' ever will.

The way to test whether your descriptor is doing work is the swap test. Replace your protagonist with 'a man' and read the sentence again. If the logline still functions, the descriptor was decoration and the story is generic; if it collapses, the descriptor was load-bearing.

A five-step drill you can run in twenty minutes

This drill works on a finished script and on a script you have not started. Do the first four steps in one sitting, then leave the fifth until the next day, because the sentence you liked yesterday is the one you can no longer see clearly.

1. Write the last scene in one sentence (2 minutes). Who decides what, and what does it cost them? Keep it crude. This line is your compass, not your logline.
2. List three wants and three obstacles (4 minutes). All three wants must be verbs with objects a camera could see. All three obstacles must be people with a plan, or forces with a deadline attached. Having three forces you to pick the one that generates conflict rather than the one that merely sounds dramatic.
3. Write five protagonist descriptors (3 minutes). Job plus history, no complimentary adjectives. Then run the swap test on each: does the sentence still work if this person is 'a man'? If yes, the descriptor is too thin.
4. Write five loglines in ten minutes without editing (10 minutes). One version per approach: the plain version, the version with no descriptor at all, the version that opens on the obstacle, the version that puts the irony last, and a version cut to 25 words. Editing during this step is what produces one timid logline instead of five useful ones.
5. Cut and test the next day (1 minute to cut, then read it out). Pick the best of the five, cut it to under 40 words, and read it aloud to someone who has not heard the idea. Then ask them three questions: who is this about, what do they want, and what happens if they fail. If they cannot answer all three, the missing answer names the slot you still have to write.

Three extra habits are worth building on top of the drill. Keep every version in the same document, because a pitch with a different producer may need the version that led with the irony instead of the version that led with the goal. Rewrite the logline every time the script changes, since a logline that still fits a script you have since rewritten is a logline that has stopped describing the film. And write the logline before you write the treatment, because the slots it refuses to fill are the scenes the treatment will otherwise hand-wave.

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