How to Write a Logline: The Formula, the Method and the Tests

How to write a logline in five steps

A logline is one sentence that tells a stranger who the story is about, what happens to them, what they must do and what is in the way. If you are still unsure what the document is for, read what a logline is first; this page is the method. Here it is in five steps, in the order that works.

1. Name the protagonist by type, not by name. A disgraced bomb-disposal officer. A widowed beekeeper. A teenage forger. The description should carry the one trait that will matter to the plot.
2. State the inciting incident. The event that breaks the status quo. "When her brother's body washes up on the wrong side of the border..."
3. State the goal as an action. What the protagonist must do, in a verb a camera can film: smuggle, prove, win back, outrun. Not "come to terms with".
4. Name the opposition and the stakes. Who or what stops them, and what they lose if they fail. If the stakes are not on the page the reader supplies "nothing much".
5. Cut to one sentence of 25 to 50 words. Remove every word that does not change the picture. Then rewrite it five more times.

Do this before you write the script if you can, because a logline that will not come together is usually reporting a story problem, not a wording problem. Do it again after the draft, because the script you wrote is never quite the one you planned. Loglines are cheap to fix. Second acts are not.

The logline formula, and why it is only a starting point

Most working loglines fit one template. Use it to find the parts, then break it once you have them.

When [INCITING INCIDENT], a [ADJECTIVE] [PROTAGONIST] must [GOAL]
before [STAKES OR DEADLINE], but [OBSTACLE OR ANTAGONIST].

Assembled: When an agoraphobic sound engineer records a murder through her apartment wall, she must identify the killer before he realises she heard everything, without leaving the building she has not stepped out of in six years. Forty words. Notice that the obstacle is baked into the protagonist: the trait she was introduced with is the thing that makes the goal hard. That is the design principle behind every strong logline, and the formula exists only to get you there.

The template's weakness is that it produces the same rhythm every time. Once the parts are on the page, reorder them. Lead with the character if the character is the hook, with the incident if the situation is, with the world if the premise is high-concept.

How long should a logline be?

Twenty-five to fifty words. One sentence, occasionally two. Under 25 words the logline is usually a tagline, a mood with no plot in it ("One night. One town. No way out."). Over 50 it has started summarising, and the reader can feel the second act arriving.

Word count is a symptom, not a target. When a logline runs long it is almost always because it contains two of something: two protagonists, two goals, two antagonists, or the goal plus the theme. Pick one. The rest of the story is not lost; it is simply not the logline's job. The one-page synopsis and the treatment exist to carry what the logline leaves out.

Comedy loglines run shorter because the joke is the premise. Thrillers run longer because the mechanism of the trap is the appeal. Both still land inside the range.

Irony and specificity: what makes a logline work

Two qualities separate a logline that gets a script requested from one that gets a polite pass.

Irony

Irony is the gap between who the protagonist is and what the story demands of them. A pacifist who must lead a war. A con artist who has to tell the truth to survive. A hospice nurse who is the only person in town who cannot die. The gap is the engine: it promises that every scene will cost the character something, and it tells the reader you understand your own premise. If your protagonist is the ideal person for the job, the logline has no tension, and the script probably has none either.

Specificity

"A man must save his family from a dangerous criminal" describes a thousand scripts and sells none. Specific nouns make the picture: a night-shift toll booth attendant, a stolen wedding dress, the last working payphone in Detroit. One well-chosen detail does more than three adjectives. Compare "a troubled detective" with "a detective three days from his pension": the second is longer in image and shorter in cliche, and it implies a deadline for free.

Specificity also fixes vague goals. "Must confront her past" is not a goal, because nobody can film it. "Must testify against the father who taught her to lie" is.

Before and after: three logline rewrites

The fastest way to learn the method is to watch it applied. Each pair below is invented. For a longer set, see the logline examples by genre.

Before: A young woman struggles with grief and family secrets after her mother dies, and discovers that not everything is as it seems.

After: When her mother's will leaves the family bakery to a stranger, a grieving pastry chef has thirty days to prove the will is forged, or watch the only home she has known go to a man who claims to be her brother.

The before has no goal, no antagonist and a placeholder ending. "Not everything is as it seems" is what a writer types when they have not decided what the secret is. The after names the secret, gives the goal a deadline and puts a face on the opposition.

Before: Two brothers go on a road trip and learn what family really means.

After: To bury their father in the town that ran him out, two estranged brothers must drive his body across four states in a stolen hearse before the funeral home reports it missing.

The before is a theme. The after is a plot with the theme inside it: you cannot drive a stolen hearse across four states with someone you are not speaking to without something being said. The reader gets the idea without being told it.

Before: A detective investigates a series of murders in a small town while dealing with his own demons.

After: A sheriff who faked his own death to escape a cartel must come out of hiding to stop a killer copying the murders he once covered up, knowing the first person to recognise him will be the last.

"His own demons" is the most common phrase in weak loglines. Name the demon. Here the demon is a specific past, and the past is the reason the goal is dangerous, which is exactly the irony the previous section described.

How to test a logline before you send it

A logline is finished when it passes these checks, not when you are tired of it.

• The stranger test. Read it to someone who knows nothing about the script. Ask them to tell you what the movie is. If their version is missing the protagonist, the goal or the obstacle, so is the logline.
• The genre test. Can the listener name the genre without being told? A logline that could be a comedy or a horror film has not chosen.
• The second-act test. Can you imagine three different scenes from the middle of the film using only the logline? If not, the premise is a situation rather than a story.
• The actor test. Would a working actor want the role described? Loglines that sell describe a part, not just a plot.
• The breath test. Say it aloud in one breath. If you run out of air, cut.

For a mechanical pass, paste the sentence into the free logline builder and pitch grader, which checks for the missing parts and flags weak verbs. Then keep the finished logline where you can see it while you draft. In Zen Writer the scene navigator gives every scene a synopsis field, and writers who keep the logline in the first scene's synopsis tend to notice sooner when the script has wandered off it. Zen Writer's free online screenplay editor has the same navigator with no login.

Logline mistakes that get scripts passed on

1. Naming the characters. "Sarah must stop Michael" tells the reader nothing, because they do not know who Sarah is. "A rookie air-traffic controller must stop her instructor" tells them everything. Names go in the synopsis.
2. Listing themes. Love, loss, redemption and identity are not events. A logline that names its themes is confessing that it has no plot to describe.
3. Ending with a question. "Will she find the courage to let go?" is a trailer voice-over, and the answer is always yes. State what she must do, and let the reader ask the question themselves.
4. Two plots. The A-story and the romance and the subplot with the father. Choose the spine. If you cannot, the script has the same problem.
5. Passive filler. "This is the story of", "we follow", "a film about". Delete them and start on the character.
6. Adjectives with no consequence. Brave, beautiful, brilliant, troubled. An adjective earns its place only when it creates the obstacle: "claustrophobic" matters in a cave story, "beautiful" matters almost never.
7. Giving away the ending. A logline poses the dramatic question. The query letter can hint at the answer and the synopsis must state it, but the logline stops at the door.

Most of these come from writing the logline as a sentence instead of building it from parts. Go back to the five steps, do them in order, and the mistakes largely take care of themselves. If the pieces still will not fit, the problem is upstream: revisit the premise before you go further into writing the screenplay, and use the rest of the screenwriting guides to check the structure underneath it.

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