

So to put it together, “A girl volunteers herself to save those she loves in a world where children fight to the death to keep the population under the control of a cruel government.” That’s a bit long, and not necessarily elegant, but it definitely hits all of the high notes of the market at that time, while also appealing emotionally to the audience. To connect the plot to the market, I would’ve said something like, “…in a world where children fight to the death to keep the population under the control of a cruel government.” This says to the book or film agent, “Dystopian! Right here! Get your dystopian!” Putting Your Novel Pitch Together

That’s not so much the case anymore, but if I had been pitching this story at that time, I would’ve definitely capitalized on the sinister dystopian world building. At the time that the first Hunger Games was published, dystopian fiction was white hot as a genre. When you pitch your plot, you always want to be thinking about where it fits in the marketplace. For example, with Hunger Games, Katniss would be “A girl hell-bent on survival…” or “A girl who volunteers herself to save those she loves…” This is a way of getting your audience on board. First, begin your logline with your character and their main struggle. That said, my surefire way to think about loglines is as follows:ġ) Connect your character to your audience Nailing it in one sentence is more of an exercise for you than a requirement of getting published. If not, you can still pitch an agent or editor with a query or a one-minute summation of your story at a conference or if you do happen to be stuck with them in an elevator. The first secret to crafting a good logline is that you should probably stop freaking out about it. Boiling down an entire book into four pages? Doable. If you think queries and synopses are hard, fiction loglines are often a whole new world of pain for writers.
#Good logline examples how to
Most Writers Struggle With How to Write a Logline An epic novel pitch session is about to go down. However, not everyone’s book fits the “meets” way of doing this, so they’re left with constructing their own short sentence to encapsulate their work. It is the same as the “ elevator pitch” or your snappy “meets” comparison ( Harry Potter meets Where the Wild Things Are!). If I ever have the need to write a logline this is how I'm going to do it.When I talk about how to write a logline, I mean crafting a quick and effective sales pitch for your story. Nothing about Chief Brody and his fear of water. Notice that the log line for JAWS didn't even refer to any of the protagonists. If I thought about it I could probably get it shorter. and save his wife, who's one of the hostages. It falls to a lone New York Cop to find a way to defeat them.

That's what the movie's about.Ī New England Resort Community is menaced by a great white shark.Ī village of poor farmers in Medieval Japan hire seven out of work Samurai to protect them from a band of brigands.Īn office building is taken over by a band of thieves posing as terrorists and a group of executives taken hostage. Here it is: A good line states the problem of the movie. It took me a long time to figure out the formula for a good log line.
#Good logline examples movie
About the simplest "formula" I've seen for writing loglines was posted by Neal Marshall Stevens in 1997 in the old newsgroup.Ī logline is "what your movie is about" expressed in a sentence or two.
