Loglines
The next step in my writing process is to develop the idea into a logline. A logline is a one-sentence concise summary of the story. It’s your story’s elevator pitch, but its purpose for this process is to distill down the idea so that you can tell at a very early stage if the idea is worth pursuing.
The Snowflake Method
I’d be remiss to mention the basis of my writing method. It’s based on the Snowflake Method from Randy Ingermanson, as detailed here. I recommend at least reading that page as its full of details about the method.
What are loglines for?
The logline is so you can test your story idea in various permutations before sitting down to write the manuscript. You can see if you have a compelling inciting incident, protagonist and central conflict.
I also find that it helps me later in the process to return to it to see if I’ve strayed too far from the logline. Sometimes that is good, in which case I make the logline more specific. Often the development process moves the story in a more interesting direction and I leave it alone, almost as a relic of where I began with a story.
Loglines are also great for when pitching the story, which you hopefully will do once it's written. You can use it as a short and sweet summary for when the invariable question of “What’s it about?” comes up. You can also use it to gauge interest in your story when you talk about it.
Why start with a logline?
A logline forces you to be as brief and specific as you can at the earliest stage of the process. What I do when developing a log line is generally approach the story from many different angles, testing to see which grabs me emotionally.
That emotional reaction is what you’re looking for in a good logline. It should make you want to write the story, and flare up all the brainstorming images that you’ve conjured so far. I find it helpful to devote a writing session simply to the logline before sleeping on it and returning the next day to suss out if you have something fun there.
How to develop a Logline
The basic formula for a logline is:
When [inciting incident], a [protagonist] must [main conflict].
You can start anywhere but for simplicity’s sake, let’s start with the inciting incident. What is the opening moment of your story? Or, what is the scene that sets off the plot? Where is the point of no return for the protagonist?
Next, you probably have some idea who you want to focus on when telling your story. You can begin to flesh them out a bit here, or even play with what the story would look like from a different character’s point of view.
Often at this point, it's best to stick to a couple of descriptors for the protagonist instead of names. Something like “a dejected former football star” or “a secret agent with a grudge”. Something that evokes the character as if you were telling someone about it. Don’t be afraid of archetypes at this stage. We can get more specific further along.
Finally, your main conflict. This is positioned in the logline as the character’s primary intention through the piece. This forms the backbone of your story from which hangs every scene. Every scene should push toward fulfilling or denying the intention. It is at the core of all the tension of the piece.
If you have an antagonist, you can put them here too, but you can also find that they develop organically out of the intention when you ask yourself “How can this go wrong? Who could stop the protagonist?”
Example Loglines
Here are some actual loglines from some of my short stories. Take a look at them and ask yourself if they are strong or weak loglines. Do they evoke an emotional response? Do they convey the three essential pieces of information a logline needs?
If I have a published story attached to a logline, I’ll link it below too.
When a beachcomber encounters a society of horrific fish-cave people living in a cave off the beach, they become enthralled by them and pull away from their lives to spend more and more time with them eventually becoming one of them. (This one became The Cave)
When a woman discovers a book of dark magic in the attic of his grandparent’s house, he must prevent the town from accidentally summoning an eldritch horror in a small town in rural Oregon. (This one became The Eyes)
When an ion/radiation storm forces the crew of a science vessel to retreat to cryostasis, they leave a robotic custodian in charge, who must deal with the possibility of an intruder on board. (This one became The Cryomonitor, which I unpublished as I’m seeking trying to get it in a magazine. This one though did not change very much from logline to written work)
Next time, we’ll tackle the next step in the method: developing a logline into a one-paragraph summary. Let me know what you think about these loglines in the comments below.