How to Write to Logline that Gets Attention

When it comes to the subject of how to write a logline, everyone says that loglines should be short but why is it so important? Why should you have to distill your idea and characters down to just one or two sentences? Let me talk to you for a minute about the ideal length of a logline. You’re going to find that a lot of books and websites and articles go on at length about just how long a logline should be.

Now, I want to help take a bit of the pressure off of you. You don’t necessarily have to distill your entire script down into just one sentence. That’s not what this post and my course is about. What I would like to teach you is the ability to be able to talk about your movie in as crisp and successful way as possible before you sit down and actually write it.

That’s the important point that you need to take away from this, that it’s crucial that you have a clear enough idea of what your movie is about and what you’d like to accomplish so that you can describe it in just a couple of sentences. If you have to ramble on and describe point by point what will happen in your movie, then you haven’t achieved that clarity of theme and purpose yet and you have to sit down and think about how you will distill this series of events into one clear idea.

I don’t know many people who can really successfully evoke the movie that they’re writing in one sentence, and I don’t want to waste your time trying to do that. So if you need one sentence, two sentences, or three sentences to evoke your film successfully, be my guest.

How to write a Logline – What’s Really Important

Don’t waste a lot of energy trying to wordsmith something into one awkward sentence, because most of you are pretty new to this, and that’s the last thing you need to be worried about. We have a lot more steps in the journey ahead, and I don’t want you driving yourself crazy, twisting yourself into a pretzel trying to figure out how to reduce this into one sentence. It’s preferable to have two or three precise sentences that give a good idea of what makes your movie stand out rather than one sentence that is vague and only remarkable for its brevity.

That’s where I part company from some of my colleagues, because I think that they get lost a little bit in definitions and spending pages, if not chapters, getting you to hone something into a specific little description that ultimately is important, but it isn’t important to get it down into one honed phrase. Your logline does need to be concise, but don’t get twisted into knots if you need more than one sentence to successfully convey your idea.

I want to take those handcuffs off you right now and tell you to relax and just make sure it’s not more than three sentences, because ultimately then you’re going to start to drift into a synopsis as opposed to a logline. You don’t need to give a play by play of all the scenes in the script, but you do need to give enough information so that the person reading or hearing your logline can easily see what makes your film unique and what elements will appeal to an audience.