Evolution of a Logline (review: Sell Your Story in a Single Sentence)

At this writing, my manuscript is finished—which I should probably put in quotes, because “finished” is such a relative term. More accurately, the fourth (-ish) draft is completed and in the hands of 4 lovely people who have agreed to beta read it. (One of them is my mom. I know you’re not supposed to ask your mom to beta read for you, but she’s one of the only people I know who can tell me if I’ve screwed anything up in either the ceramic art side of things or the chemistry of any poisons that may or may not show up somewhere in the novel.)

More Than Blood has also—and I couldn’t be prouder—been selected as a finalist in for the Killer Nashville Claymore Award, given to an unpublished manuscript and based on the first fifty pages. My writer offspring and I will be attending the Killer Nashville conference next week, my first-ever fiction writing conference.

The Claymore and conference have at last goaded me into thinking about what querying this book might look like, what that whole process involves, and how hard a metaphorical hard hat I may need to acquire. (They don’t call it the “query trenches” for nothing.) I’ve learned that one of the key components of querying, conferences, talking to agents, etc. is the one-sentence log line for one’s story. It’s sometimes called the “elevator pitch,” but essentially it’s a very brief and clear response to the question, “what’s your book about?”

These suckers are hard to craft.

A writer in my author group (who’s been treading the query trenches for a while, and whose book is fantastic—I await the inevitable day the right agent snaps her up so I can have the whole thing in my hand and dive into it) referred a book she has been using for hers: Sell Your Story in a Single Sentence: Advice from the Front Lines of Hollywood, by Lane Shefter Bishop.

Somewhere around page 26 Bishop says, “a logline is not a retelling of the entire plot, crammed into one very long run-on sentence. You’d be surprised at how many writers try desperately to make that work, to no avail. I’ve seen some supposed loglines that were absolutely ridiculous: lengthy sentences with dashes and parentheses and all manner of cheats to try to make a one-liner.”  

Well!

At this point I was fully prepared to hate the author and her book. I mean, I felt…attacked, especially when she called out these “hot mess write-ups.” I mean, seriously, who does she think she is, getting inside my head like that? It’s not like she’s actually read my first attempt at a logline.

Unless she has. Because, voilà:

After receiving news of her godmother’s sudden death, shy musician Willow Stone returns to Little North Island, where she becomes embroiled in a dangerous quest: to save a historical mansion from being sold to developers and uncover the truth behind the mysterious deaths of its former owners—all while trying to keep herself alive, in a community determined to keep its generations of secrets buried at any cost.

I re-read it and sighed. Yeah. It’s all true. It’s an 83-word hot mess.

Here’s a marginally tighter attempt from before I got the book, 62 words total:

Willow would do anything to honor her estranged godmother’s final wish—to save a historical Maine mansion from developers—but first she must navigate a community steeped in treachery and buried secrets and figure out who is murdering the property’s heirs one by one, without becoming the next victim herself.

The living aren’t much help. Fortunately, the mansion is full of ghosts.

It’s not one sentence, obviously, but it can survive with only the first, and I sort of like it—but it reads more like a back cover blurb than something I could say in an elevator.

So, gritting my teeth and cursing a little…I bought the damn book.

And it’s good. Worth every penny.

The author essentially boils the logline down to the key elements of the story: who is the protagonist? What do they want? What’s at stake? From there, each chapter drills down deeper into each of those questions and strips away everything else. And each chapter ends with a series of exercises, offering bloated loglines that commit the specific errors from that section, challenging the reader to revise accordingly, and growing cumulatively more difficult throughout the book. So I worked through them all, and with each chapter’s exercises complete, I went back for another pass at my own. An exercise in (fruitful) humility.

The shortest I got it was 20 words:

A shy musician must discover who is killing off heirs to a haunted mansion before she becomes the next victim.

This wasn’t the one either; it’s short and to the point, but it feels way too generic. Fortunately I still had a couple of chapters to go in Sell Your Story, the ones that talk about putting back into your logline the things that are specific to your project.

This is where I am now:

A shy musician would do anything to honor her estranged godmother’s final wish—to save a historical mansion from developers—but she needs the assistance of the mansion’s ghosts to catch whoever has been murdering the property’s heirs one by one.

—or—

A shy musician would do anything to save her late godmother’s historical mansion from developers, but she needs the assistance of the mansion’s ghosts to catch whoever has been murdering the property’s heirs one by one.

—or even—

A shy musician would do anything to save her estranged godmother’s historical mansion from developers—but unless she can get the mansion’s ghosts to help her, she might be next on a murderer’s list.

They may still be a little long at 43, 36, and 34 words, respectively (various internet sources say anything from “under 25 words” to “30-50 words” are acceptable), but these are the first attempts where I’ve managed to catch the most important facets of the story: protagonist, motivation, haunted house, murder, and ghostly allies. It lost the “before she becomes the next victim,” but that’s maybe implied, and in any case it’s not the most important ticking clock in the story.

Anyway, if I ever thought writing the damn novel would be the hardest part, I am swiftly being robbed of my illusions. Like everything, it’s a work in progress, I suppose! We’ll see how my logline evolves moving forward.

See you in Nashville!