Logline Exercises, Part 1

You have a sentence. Let’s try a logline.

I’ve gone from daydreaming about the world to playing with a story idea to writing the story in a sentence . . . and now to crafting the logline.

It should feel like a funneling downward of your attention from the open skies of possibility to, say, the mess of Legos on your desk.

It’s time to try and put these things together.

Pieces. Blocks. Gears.

The pieces are like the elements of the story: hero, desire, antagonist, goal.

The blocks are like acts. These are phrases and clauses that represent the big movements of the story.

And gears are like the transitional beats, the moments when things change or the hero makes a choice, like the catalyst, break into two, midpoint, death moment, or final lesson. You might also call these things hinges, joints, or springs: they connect, turn, twist, or accelerate.

These are just metaphors, of course. They’re ways of thinking about putting your story into a logline. You don’t have to think of your story as a mess of Legos, gears, blocks, and hinges.

But what we’re about to do is going to feel cold and calculated compared to what we’ve been doing.

Coming up with story ideas can be fun and light and personal. This step, however, demands focus and detachment. We’re swapping elements in and out of the logline. We’re not getting too attached to any of these elements. So thinking of them metaphorically — as Legos, blocks, hinges, gears, pieces — helps establish a bit of distance between us and the story.

We’re not going to get too attached to our cuddly Build-A-Bear.

We’re making a watch: cool and precise.

I have a version of the following super-simple thingie in my head. Think of this as a baby logline, a precursor to the full logline. It’s a stepping stone to get from the bank of the sentence to this thing in the middle of the river and then to the logline on the other side.

A hero wants to enter a new world, but there’s a catch, and at the death moment, they’ll regret wanting to do it this way.

I owe a bit of this to Jill Chamberlain’s great book The Nutshell Technique (2016). She clarifies a relationship between particular beats in the story that represent key moments in the hero’s transformation.

The movie she discussed that sticks most with me is The Bourne Identity (2002). She identifies Bourne’s setup desire: he has amnesia, so he wants to find out who he is. Once he discovers he’s a government assassin, he regrets discovering his true identity. He doesn’t want to be this person anymore. He wants to grow. Good for you, Jason! I know you’ll transform yourself in the final act!

Sort of.

Anyway, the baby logline for the movie, if you will, is something like: A young man with amnesia wants to find out who he is, but people are trying to kill him, and when he finds out he’s an assassin, he wishes he could forget.

This baby logline focuses on only select beats of the hero’s transformation (revealing some nice irony) and stops short of the final act. We’re leaving a whole lot out. We’re not dealing with the B story, midpoint, or finale.

Why focus on only these beats?

Well, if we don’t have an active hero driving the story through the stages of their own transformation, then we’ll get a SOFT BLOB of a story, and anything else you try to attach to that blob isn’t going to change the blob.

It’ll still be a blob, just with a lot of junk stuck to it.

Let’s walk through the baby Bourne logline.

A hero > A young man with amnesia | This is how we meet our flawed hero. He has a spark, though: he can do amazing things without thinking. That’s the fantasy of following along with this hero. That’s the “Wouldn’t it be cool if . . .” hook for his character.

Wants to enter a new world > Wants to find out who he is | This is his setup desire. It’s the desire that motivates him to enter the second act. He’s not going to stop until he finds out who he is.

But there’s a catch > But people are trying to kill him | Here are the antagonists. Without them, the story would be, uh . . . a nice road trip. We need these corrupt father figures and super-assassin siblings to come after wayward son Jason Bourne.

And at the death moment > And when he finds out he’s an assassin | So the hero succeeds in achieving the goal of his setup desire. He gets what he wants. He knows who he is.

They’ll regret wanting to do it this way > He wishes he could forget. | And his identity is a bummer. He’s literally a man of death. Is he still a man of death? It seems like on this journey of self-discovery, he has become someone else, someone who wants to renounce their past self and grow.

And that means he’s going to move into the final act with a purpose: to confront and reject his corrupt father figure (Conklin) and embrace instead the life he began on his own (with Marie Kreutz).

The baby logline appears deceptively simple, but because these stages of the hero’s growth parallel how people grow in their own lives, we have something strong and genuine to cling to — the spine or trunk of the story, not a blob — as we add to it the chase scenes and fight scenes and everything else.

More metaphors: the storyline as a spine or the hero’s growth as a tree trunk. Whatever metaphor or way of thinking helps you develop your story, use it.

Just not blob. No blobs.

Let’s try it with one of my sentences from my previous post.

I’ll take this: A sudden inheritance enables a chef to open his first restaurant while his fiancée argues they should use the money to travel the world.

And try to express it in this format: A hero wants to enter a new world, but there’s a catch, and at the death moment, they’ll regret wanting to do it this way.

A hero > A young chef with a sudden inheritance | I guess this works. A sudden inheritance is not a character trait or a flaw, but it does complicate his life. Let’s keep going.

Wants to enter a new world > Wants to open his first restaurant | Now I wonder about this because, in my mind, I envision the new world of Act 2 to be what his fiancée wants: traveling the world.

But there’s a catch > But his fiancée wants to travel the world | Yeah, this doesn’t seem right.

And at the death moment > And when he opens his first restaurant | Uh, this is not exactly a death moment. This is where the hero is supposed to achieve their setup desire, and it’s often ironic. It’s the death of an envisioned Act 2 self. Opening a restaurant doesn’t serve that function in the story of the hero’s growth.

They’ll regret wanting to do it this way > He wishes he never opened the restaurant. | Blah. I’m exposing the weakness of my story idea. The Lego blocks aren’t fitting together.

Talk about a blob! I’ll start over.

A young chef with a sudden inheritance wants to travel the world, but his fiancée argues he should pursue his calling and open a restaurant. . . ?

All right. I’m seeing the problems here. Everything is too nice. There’s no conflict! I’m not acting like a dramatist. I’m acting like a travel agent. I’m booking these two lovebirds on a free trip around the world! They already love each other, so where’s the potential for growth? Ain’t none.

Again: A young chef who wants to take over his dying mentor’s restaurant must earn the privilege by chaperoning his mentor’s spoiled adult daughter on a trip to her home village in Italy.

I know someone who traveled to his family’s hometown in Italy before opening his own restaurant, Supino Pizzeria, in Detroit. So that popped into my head. And that gave me the idea that our hero would have to earn his new restaurant by chaperoning an unwilling young woman to her family’s ancestral village in Italy.

I had said in an earlier post that if a hero wants to return home because his wife is giving birth, then his journey can’t be easy. We don’t want to see him sipping a drink on a first-class flight. We want to see him on a cross-country bus with a talking skunk. I just caught myself making that very error: I made things too easy for the hero. I booked my young chef on a first-class flight and brought him a flute of champagne. I needed to book my hero on a bus with a skunk.

So to speak.

In most romantic comedies, odd couples are thrown together and butt heads and gradually fall in love. So my couple can’t start out already engaged, for crying out loud. They have to start out as strangers butting heads on a joint mission.

So as they butt heads on their journey to some quaint Italian town, they will gradually fall in love . . . until the mentor dies, and they return to find the restaurant in terrible debt! Was the whole journey a waste of time, or can love cook up a fresh start?

The funny thing is I honestly thought my original “young chef” story was good! I didn’t see its weaknesses, which were HUGE, until I sat at the desk with its Lego pieces and tried to fit them together into this baby logline.

Thank you, Logline.

Okay, let’s try again.

A young chef wants to take over his dying mentor’s restaurant, but to do so, he has to chaperone his mentor’s spoiled adult daughter on a trip to her home village in Italy. When the mentor dies leaving the young chef saddled with a restaurant in terrible debt, the young chef regrets ever wanting to take it over.

And, of course, the final act will be the hero changing his mind about auctioning off the restaurant piece by piece. Instead, he’ll race to persuade his mentor’s daughter that, together, with all they learned in the quaint Italian village, they can reinvent the restaurant and restore her father’s legacy . . . yes, and get married, too.

A wedding reception at the new restaurant!

Evviva gli sposi!

_____

PHOTO: My brother Mike took this photo when he visited Matera, Italy, last year for a wedding. Yes, it’s the same place they filmed part of the Bond movie No Time to Die (2021).