Amber Gentry: Screenwriter in Jacksonville, Florida.

nice to have you here with us :)

Thank you!

Good luck. Best thing to do is just sit down and start writing things down. Ideas, characters, scenes, what you've got in mind to get the momentum going. You'll also be able to focus on which idea is ready to go. Which one gets your attention going so it can give you a good place to start. Go for it.

Thanks ML. I’ll check it out!

I think it's great! Only suggestion might be subbing "an avenging" for "a vengeful". It just sort of roles better.

Amber Gentry Very simple and effective logline. I'm sure it'll work for many you're pitching to as an initial interest-grabber. The only thing I'd consider is extending it a little to incorporate some further detail on stakes and conflict. But great work. Here if I can be of any further assistance.

What's good, Amber! There are many 'formulas' to writing an effective logline. I use this one for the most part: WHEN, the inciting incident happens, A FLAWED LEAD, MUST, the objective., OR ELSE, the stakes. ... Try running your components through this equation and see what you get...

Ok, so I did some more thinking and I came up with this: “After an American steals from the British mob, a bumbling Scottish lackey must pose as a therapist and kill the American to become a made man”

A loglines job is to tell me who the protagonist is, what they must do because of an obstacle placed before them and what MAY happen if they fail.

When a bumbling mob lackey finds himself posing as the therapist in order to kill his bosses enemy, he must …… before …..

If killing the American is the goal then he must kill the American before for example the American kills him. Or the mob lose patience and kill the lackey. Say he befriends or falls in love with the American and doesn't want to kill him/her. The mob gets pissed and sends a killer to end both their lives.

For example …. A bumbling mob lackey finds himself posing as a therapist to kill his bosses enemy in order to become a made man. When they fall in love, he must come clean and escape before his boss discovers the truth and sends men to kill them both.

Whist the above example is not great it demonstrates to the reader exactly who and what the story is about. It shows what happens to stop the Protagonist achieving his perceived goals, in order to achieve a goal that would truly bring him happiness. Thus arcing the Protagonist from his belief money and status will bring him happiness, when in fact love is what brings him into his own. Through love he finds courage and conviction he never had.

Obviously I have no idea the tone or plot to your screenplay, this is just an example. However had the logline been right I would know. Remember a log line is not a teaser, it exists only to tell the reader what they need to know in order to open the screenplay. Leaving out plot points doesn't make the reader open the page to discover what happens. It makes the reader less likely because they are not given everything they want to make an informed choice over another well formatted Logline. They are looking for the next money making project and they will pick up the screenplay that tells them what they need to know before they read it. The logline is for that purpose only, it is a tool for the industry to work out which script to read in an over saturated market.

A lot of logline get stuck in Act1. This feels a bit like that. Some of the detail you give is important in the plot, like being newly wed and it being a road trip. But in a logline I think a helicopter view is best.

After unwittingly accept help from the devil a couple must .... or .... but.... forcing them to .....

Thank you to those who provided feedback and offered suggestions. Simple things that I over looked.

For those who were wondering, the reason why I was asking for the feedback was because I was reading Blake Snyder’s book, Save the Cat. And he says to start with a logline for various reasons. One of which is it helps the writer to stay focused on what the story itself is about. In his examples you get a lot of info in a logline.

So I will go back to the drawing board to insert the much needed conflict that is missing.

I can't imagine the story from this logline, and that is the purpose of a logline.

Aside from the Devil thing (which is not very unique), what is the physical conflict at the center of your story? What is the struggle that this couple will have for the middle third of your screenplay?

Also, I don't see the connection between driving to Hollywood (a lot of words used on that) and whatever happens when their car breaks down. All of the pieces of a logline need to logically & obviously be part of the story.

Focus on that central conflict. One of the tools in my Loglines Treatments and Pitching Blue Book is to find photos that match each word in your logline so that the logline is about a story that we can see. We want to be able to read the logline and visualize the story - and that requires words that evoke images rather than vague ideas.