Sell Your Story in Single Sentence

by Lane Shefter Bishop

  Notice that every part of this story is expanded from our first simple sentence to a longer form of material; it all comes from the logline itself. Think about what a great base you have to work from! When the characters are well-defined, when what they want is clear and what is at stake is understood, then it’s an easy process to build on those elements to create a fully fleshed-out write-up, which people are going to want to read—and hopefully buy.

  Chapter 21

  Everything Works

  WRITERS SOMETIMES DON’T INITIALLY BELIEVE ME when I tell them that every great story can be broken down into a powerful one-sentence logline. This probably stems from the ongoing misconception that a logline is essentially a one-sentence summary of the plot, which of course it is not. A 300-page novel will never become a single sentence logline with that incorrect assumption. The reason that any piece of material can be broken down into a true logline is because each and every tale has one thing in common: a reliance on the same main three components that appear in a good logline. In fact, the logline has those elements precisely because all truly top-notch stories have those exact origins.

  At dinner parties, my friends and I sometimes make a game of figuring out the logline for a certain show or film. Usually they are trying to stump me! But there are no exceptions to the fact that any story can be broken down into a solid logline. Below are just a few very rough examples I’ve created from both television and film, scripted and unscripted, both live action and animation, and even a stage play.

  Breaking Bad (Fiction Drama TV Series)

  A poor chemistry teacher with lung cancer becomes an unlikely meth dealer to secure his family’s financial future before he dies.

  The Hunger Games (Fiction Feature Film)

  In a dystopian future, a girl must survive a government-created “game” where teens kill teens, in order to save her sister’s life.

  Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (Reality TV)

  A child beauty pageant contestant and her outrageous family pick at scab of what’s “socially acceptable” while redefining the redneck stereotype.

  Les Misérables (Theatrical Musical)

  During the French revolution, a prisoner breaks parole and is hunted by a vigilant police inspector.

  Sherlock (Fiction Drama TV Series)

  A talented but antisocial PI and his physician sidekick solve cases to help an inept police force stop multiple killers.

  South Park (Adult Animated Sitcom)

  Four young boys, with crude language and dark humor, satirize situations which arise in this fictional Colorado town.

  How to Survive a Plague (Nonfiction Feature Film)

  Long-unseen amateur footage tells the true story of how advocacy groups responded to the AIDS crisis during the absence of official help.

  Twilight (Fiction Feature Film)

  A small-town girl puts her life at risk when she falls in love with a boy who turns out to be a vampire.

  Duck Dynasty (Reality TV)

  A family, known for their uber-long beards and Christian views, becomes stupid rich making products for duck hunters.

  X-Men (Fiction Feature Film)

  Two men with unique genetic mutations fight on opposing sides, when humans discover the existence of a great many of their kind within the population.

  Dancing with the Stars (Television Variety Show)

  Past celebrities are paired with professional dancers to compete through a variety of dance styles until one couple is chosen as champion.

  The Importance of Being Earnest (Comedy Play)

  A man pretends to have a scandalous brother as a cover for his own bad behavior when he’s away, but risks losing his love when the ruse is discovered.

  How I Met Your Mother (Fiction Comedy TV Series)

  A man tells his kids tales of his past love life adventures in NY, while they guess which woman ultimately became their mother.

  Room 237 (Nonfiction Feature Film)

  An anthology of varying improbable theories shake up the familiar perception of Kubrick’s film The Shining.

  Captain America (Fiction Feature Film)

  A scrawny man is transformed, through a secret government project and serum, into a super-human soldier to stop Nazi attempts at world domination.

  Hardcore Pawn (Reality TV)

  A family struggles to operate a drama-filled pawn shop in the most dangerous part of Detroit, Michigan.

  How to Train Your Dragon (Animated Feature Film)

  A young Viking must fight his father’s outdated beliefs to prove that Dragons can be friends rather than killers.

  Arrow (Fiction TV Series)

  A billionaire playboy begins fighting crime as a caped vigilante using only a bow and arrow.

  The Simpsons (Animated Comedy TV Series)

  A man’s basement IQ and screwy family affect his ability to be a good husband and father.

  Big (Fiction Feature Film)

  A boy’s wish to be “big” is granted, but after living as a child trapped in an adult’s body and world, he is desperate to return to being a carefree kid.

  Survivor (Reality TV Game Show)

  A group of marooned strangers must survive, while competing in challenges, in order to become “sole survivor” and win one million dollars.

  Romancing the Stone (Fiction Feature Film)

  A timid romance writer discovers a priceless emerald and true love when she travels to the jungles of Colombia to save her sister from a madman.

  House (Fiction Drama TV Series)

  A world-renowned but troubled doctor uses extremely unorthodox methods to solve the most difficult-to-diagnose cases.

  Annie (Theatrical Musical)

  An orphaned girl is adopted by a wealthy, emotion-phobic man to whom she must teach the true meaning of “family.”

  The Dr. Oz Show (Television Talk Show)

  A doctor known for giving “non-scientific” advice explores medical issues and personal health to help a live audience as well as those at home.

  Jurassic Park (Fiction Feature Film)

  A scientist travels to a cloned-dinosaur theme park but when the creatures break free from captivity, he must save his family and get them off the island.

  As you can see from the examples I’ve provided above, it doesn’t matter whether the product is a drama or comedy, thriller, romance, or action-adventure. Additionally, I purposely chose all different types of media—like animation and reality television—to break down into loglines in order to show that it unequivocally works for everything. You’ll also notice that it’s unimportant what the overall length of the final show happens to be. It also makes no difference whether the distribution method is television or feature film or theatrical play. Every story can be successfully broken down into one solid, captivating selling sentence. That’s what makes a logline so extraordinarily powerful.

  Chapter 22

  Conclusion

  HAVE YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO BRING YOUR WORDS AND ideas to a bigger audience? Have you always believed you had the next great story or screenplay inside, waiting to be set free? This book has presented you with the key to unlocking all of that potential, to letting the rest of the world know—in only one amazing sentence—that you definitely have what everyone else is going to want. You can personally know that your work is the best thing since sliced toast, but if you can’t make the rest of the world aware of it, you are doing yourself a disservice.

  The art of the logline is really about gaining experience in a process that can lead to incredible opportunity. After all, selling is a way of life. Every day, what we choose to wear sells our personality, how we deal with our bosses sells our skill in handling our jobs, and how we drive sells our credibility to the DMV. At its core, our world truly revolves around marketing. In just the same way, our ability to answer a question about what we are currently working on sells our most important commodity: our creativity.

  What good does it do you to write an amazing blockbuster film, cool short story,
or even the next best seller if you can’t pitch it? I always ask filmmakers about this because many of them, when they are starting out, don’t think about distribution. The goal is just “get the movie made.” While that’s an admirable goal, there’s no point in going through the difficulties of packaging, casting, pre-production, production, and post-production only to realize that you haven’t set up any kind of delivery system, so no one is going to see your film. In creative industries, as with the rest of the working world, it is—and yes, I know I’m repeating myself—all about selling. And the true gift of a good logline is that it can help you achieve the goal of getting someone (like a potential theatrical distributor, for example) excited about your work.

  To me, a logline is like a fabulous culinary experience: Filled with the right ingredients, it can fill you up while simultaneously making you ache for more. It also shows your creative ability and powerful talent. So the impact of being able to craft that influential sentence should not be underestimated. It’s come in handy many times during my career of 20-plus years in the entertainment industry.

  Recently, I had lunch with an executive with an overall deal at Universal who casually mentioned a need for some male-driven, action-oriented content. At that moment, I was able to rattle off a logline for a new property I’d just been given which fit that bill, and not even a week later, the two of us were developing it with the author—who hadn’t even written much yet. She only had a proposal, but it was enough to develop, to take in as a feature film to Universal Pictures. The takeaway from this is that one dynamic sentence, one deceptively simple and very brief pitch, can truly change everything.

  So you’ve read this book and studied both what loglines really are and how to create them successfully—and now it’s time to put those new skills to use. I suggest running later drafts of your logline by others who have read your material, to see if they feel it identifies the protagonist, what that person wants, and, of course, what is at stake (as discussed numerous times in the earlier chapters of this book). Overall, does your logline help express the story in a way that encourages interest in reading the query letter and eventually the full manuscript? There is nothing more helpful than gaining a new perspective on your logline by checking it out with others to see if they become engaged and excited by your one-sentence masterpiece or not. After numerous drafts and umpteen revisions, I am often thankful to find someone with fresh eyes to take a peek. That way, I have a new neutral barometer on how the logline is working—or not working, as the case may be. Don’t underestimate the worth of new eyes with a new perspective.

  Throughout this book, you’ve learned a great deal of information that will provide you with the ammunition you need to sell your story. You’ve discovered that loglines can help you stay on track as you write your story. This is incredibly valuable, because it can save you hours of rewriting later on down the line. And as someone who writes, you know how helpful it would be to have a few extra hours back in your corner when you need them. Additionally, you’ve found out that loglines are the ultimate selling tool. They can help you to share your literary masterpiece with agents, editors, publishers, executives, other writers, neighbors, and friends in a way that expresses how unique and dramatic it truly is. What a boon to be able to sell your “baby” with a minimum of muss and fuss to anyone who asks. Most important, you now know that loglines give you the power to answer the question of what your story is about with an engaging sentence that will entice people to give it that first read. And that, my friends, is true success.

  For more information and help with loglines, go to www.SellItInaSentence.com

  Logline Cheat Sheet

  1.Write down a logline, even if it’s rambling, just to get started.

  2.Ask yourself: “Who is the protagonist?”

  3.Determine the number of protagonists (one, two, or multiple).

  4.Ask: “What does the protagonist want?”

  5.Be specific in your answer.

  6.Ask: “What is at stake?”

  7.Again, ask: “What happens if they don’t achieve what they want?”

  8.Be specific in your answer.

  9.Remind yourself that this can only be one tight sentence.

  10. Make sure to cut names.

  11. Make sure to cut ages.

  12. Make sure to cut unnecessary adjectives and unneeded words.

  13. Check that you are using active rather than passive voice.

  14. Finesse: use better vocabulary and make any final tweaks or edits.

  15. Share your logline with others—are they are excited by your story?

  16. If not, revise it again.

  17. If so, memorize your logline.

  18. Sell your story in a single sentence.

  Logline Samples & Explanations

  These are rough draft loglines taken directly from some of my own projects. They will give you a strong sense of what works and why.

  1.An African American woman uses magical powder to appear white, but when she discovers it’s made with arsenic she hunts for the creator to stop people from dying.

  The descriptive “African American” is left in intentionally, as it is vital to the plot of the story. Also, “magical” is necessary to let you know that there is a fantasy element in the book. Notice, as well, that the woman doesn’t “look” for the creator, she “hunts” for him. This makes the logline more active and dynamic.

  2.A man discovers an unusual emerald, not realizing that its powers will erase the memories of all who touch it.

  In the book, it’s actually the world’s largest emerald, and for a time, that was listed as the beginning of the logline. But as it was rewritten again and again, I asked myself how vital that really was to the story. Nifty, yes—but vital? No. Slowly, I realized that it wasn’t as important as the fact that the emerald had unusual properties, since that was the element moving the action forward. Once that was clarified, suddenly, the rest of the logline fell into place.

  3.A reporter is convinced that an old age home owner is killing her residents, and puts his own life in danger to prove it.

  The writer was under the impression that the old age home owner was the protagonist, and the original logline reflected that. But it’s the reporter’s investigation that drives the story forward, and the risk of him getting killed in the process is what’s at stake. An earlier draft ended with “… trying to prove it,” but in the active voice of a logline, you don’t try—you do. So the word “trying” was cut out of this later version.

  4.A debutante learns that only by helping those she wronged in life can she ascend to heaven after her death.

  Why “debutante” instead of “girl”? In this situation, it’s the character’s own selfish, spoiled actions that seal her fate; they affect everything that happens to her in the story. So it was important to emphasize the kind of person she is, and that word became the easiest way to do so without a lot of unnecessary description (which was in previous drafts of the logline).

  5.An elf who can reanimate animals is kidnapped by a wizard who steals her abilities and awakens griffins, the killers of elves.

  This was a very complicated fantasy story, filled with dragons, gold, fairies, magic, warlocks, and many other elements. The writer was desperate to figure out how to create a logline with so much going on in the book. Only by boiling the plot down to its basic components—who is the protagonist? (the elf); what is his/her journey? (to escape her kidnapper); what is at stake? (the death of all elves if she fails)—did the logline finally become clear.

  6.A slacker teen decides to run for mayor in order to get the girl and, to everyone’s surprise, he wins.

  It was important to make clear here the exact reason the teen ran for mayor, because that specifies what the protagonist wants. Let me clarify: He doesn’t want to run for mayor; he wants to impress a hot chick who’s in his class, which ends in his half-baked idea to run for mayor. And what’s at stake? Well, now he has to follow through and actually b
e the mayor!

  7.An author uses her friends’ lives as book fodder and accidentally creates a best seller that threatens to ruin her relationships with them.

  The toughest thing here was concentrating on only the one protagonist, because in the book, all four women are given equal time and equal weight. In fact, each chapter is told by a different woman in the group. That said, it was the woman whose actions (in writing the truth-based book) affected everyone else, which kept the story moving along at its fast and furious pace. So it became clear that she needed to be the focus of the logline.

  8.A nice kid who’s a crappy superhero decides he’ll be an awesome villain instead, but struggles since he isn’t wired to be mean.

  This was such a cute concept that it was important to me to choose vocabulary that reflected that tone, hence my use of words like “crappy” and “awesome,” adjectives which I would normally cut. I even ended up keeping the word “nice,” because I felt it helped explain why the kid would have trouble being a villain and wasn’t “wired to be mean.”

  9.A dog trainer finds the lessons she uses on her animals work even better on the men she dates.

  This is a nonfiction/memoir property for which I helped the writer twist her occupation to create a hook, which ultimately helped her write a more unique piece about her dating experiences. That’s why you always write the logline early in your creation process, before you write the entire manuscript—I just can’t stress that enough.

  10. Young twins use their sleuthing skills to become the go-to gals for solving cold cases, which continually puts them in hot water.