Free Logline Generator

A logline is a test, not a summary — and failing it is useful information

Try to write your logline. If you cannot, the standard interpretation is that you are bad at loglines. The far more likely interpretation is that the story does not have a spine yet, and the sentence is simply reporting that fact back to you with unusual honesty. A logline is compressive; it only compresses things that have structure. You cannot fold fog.

This is a gift, and it is worth being explicit about the economics. Discovering that your protagonist has no want costs one minute at the logline stage. It costs roughly nine months and a full manuscript at the beta-reader stage, where the note arrives disguised as something else entirely — "the middle dragged," "I did not connect with her," "I kept waiting for something to happen." Those three notes are almost always the same note, and the same note is: nobody in this book is trying to get anything specific, so nothing that happens can be a setback.

So run the sentence before you outline, not after you draft. Not to sell the book. To find out whether it is a book.

• "The middle dragged" usually means the goal was never concrete enough to be blocked.
• "I did not connect with her" often means the flaw was never named, so nothing could cost her anything.
• "I kept waiting for something to happen" almost always means there was no inciting event — just a situation the character is living inside.
• If your one-sentence pitch keeps needing a second sentence to make sense, the second sentence is where your actual story starts. Move it.

Five load-bearing parts. Remove one and the sentence collapses.

A working logline is not a formula, but it does have a parts list, and the parts are not stylistic preferences. Each one is doing structural work, and you can feel the sag the moment one goes missing.

Read your own draft logline against the list below and mark which of the five you actually have. Most stalled manuscripts are missing exactly one — and the one they are missing is almost always opposition with agency, because a protagonist can be blocked by weather, bureaucracy, or their own indecision for four hundred pages without anything ever escalating. Weather does not adapt. A rival does.

• A protagonist with a flaw. Not a demographic and not a job. The flaw is what makes this story cost this person something a different person would not have to pay.
• An inciting event that forces a choice. Something arrives; the old life stops being available. If your protagonist could ignore it and be fine, it is not inciting.
• A concrete goal. Visible, losable, and checkable — someone watching from across the street could tell whether they got it.
• Opposition with agency. Someone or something that wants the opposite and can change tactics when it loses. Escalation requires an opponent who can learn.
• A cost of failure. Not "the world ends" unless the world ending is genuinely felt by one person we care about. The best stakes are specific, personal, and irreversible.

Four broken loglines, one missing part each, repaired

It is faster to learn this by repair than by definition. Below are four loglines of the kind that show up in a query slush pile every day. Each one is missing exactly one of the five parts, and each one gets worse the longer you look at it — not because the writing is bad, but because a reader's brain keeps trying to fill the hole and cannot.

Note what the repairs have in common. Not one of them added adjectives, and not one made the sentence more beautiful. Every repair added a specific, checkable noun where an abstraction had been sitting. Abstraction is where loglines go to die, and it is also, not coincidentally, where second acts go to die.

The irony test: is the goal the worst possible thing for this particular person?

The single fastest way to tell a strong logline from a competent one is to look for the gap between what the protagonist wants and what they need. Irony, in this technical sense, has nothing to do with sarcasm. It means the story has been cast correctly: the person pursuing this goal is the person least equipped to pursue it, and the pursuit will therefore force them to confront the exact thing they have organized their life around avoiding.

A claustrophobic detective assigned to a case in a mine. A compulsive liar who must be believed to survive. A mother who has spent twenty years making herself invisible and now has to be seen or lose the child. In each of them the plot and the wound are the same object, which is why the plot generates character change instead of merely occurring near it. Swap in a protagonist without that particular flaw and the story still functions mechanically — it just stops mattering.

So put your logline through one question and be honest about the answer: could I swap in a competent stranger and lose nothing? If yes, you have a situation, not a story. The fix is upstream of the sentence, in the casting, and it is a good problem to have at this stage because it is still nearly free to solve.

The gap between want and need is not a theme you add later. It is the engine. If the logline does not have it, the manuscript will not find it on its own.

The word ceiling is not a constraint. It is the whole test.

Somewhere around twenty-five to thirty words, a logline stops being able to hide. Under that ceiling there is no room for a subplot, no room for a second point of view, no room for the setting you love, and no room for the thing you have not admitted is not working. Writers experience this as cruelty. It is closer to a service: the ceiling is the mechanism by which the test gets performed.

Which means the goal is not to shorten a long summary. It is to find out what refuses to be cut. When you are forced to choose between naming the sister and naming the deadline, you learn something real about which one the story runs on. Do the cutting in this order, and pay attention to what hurts.

And when the sentence is finally short, read it out loud to somebody who does not know the book. Watch their face at the halfway point. If they are still with you at word fifteen, the spine is holding. If their eyes go, the spine went first, and no rewording will bring it back — you will have to go back into the story and put something load-bearing where the abstraction is.

• Cut all proper nouns except the protagonist. Places, sidekicks, and invented terms are cover — they make a sentence feel specific while saying nothing.
• Cut every subplot. If a subplot cannot be cut, it is not a subplot; it is the plot, and you have been writing the wrong book.
• Cut the twist. A logline sells the premise, not the reveal. Announcing the turn in the pitch spends it for nothing.
• Cut adjectives before you cut nouns. "A brilliant, driven, reckless surgeon" is one noun and three excuses.
• Keep the deadline. If your story has a clock, the clock belongs in the sentence — it does more work per word than any other element.

A logline, a blurb, a synopsis, and a pitch are four different documents

Enormous amounts of author effort are wasted by making one of these do another one's job. The blurb that reads like a synopsis is the most common failure on Amazon; the query hook that reads like a blurb is the most common failure in a slush pile. They differ in length, but far more importantly they differ in who is reading and what that person is deciding.

The logline is upstream of all three. Get it right and the others get materially easier, because each is a controlled expansion of the same spine: the blurb adds voice and withholds the ending, the synopsis adds the whole plot including the ending, and the pitch adds you and the market. Get it wrong and you will write all three around a hole, three separate times.

Once the spine holds, the rest is expansion. Take your logline into BookWriter and build the outline and your first polished chapter around it — the first chapter is free, and a full book is $19.99.