The Logline Formula, With 25 Examples

This guide gives the formula, walks through its parts, presents 25 examples across film, television and prose, and lists the ways loglines go wrong.

The formula

When [inciting event], a [adjective] [protagonist] must [goal] before [stakes], despite [opponent or obstacle].

The order can change. The parts cannot be skipped. Each does specific work:

• Inciting event: the thing that happens and starts the story. It tells the reader where the story begins and gives the sentence a verb.
• Adjective + protagonist: a descriptive noun phrase, not a name. The adjective should be the flaw or the irony that the story will test. "A nurse" is a job. "A nurse who cannot stop rescuing people" is a character.
• Goal: what the protagonist is trying to do, stated as an action with a visible end. "Find peace" is not a goal. "Get her brother across the border" is.
• Stakes: what happens if they fail. Without stakes the reader does not care whether the goal is reached.
• Opponent or obstacle: who or what stands in the way. Ideally a person, because people can escalate.

The best loglines also contain irony: a tension between the protagonist and the situation. A pacifist who must fight. A con artist who must tell the truth. Irony is what makes a logline feel like a story rather than a summary.

25 examples

The examples below are written to illustrate the formula. Those for existing films and books are our own descriptions of their premises, not the official loglines. The original examples are ours.

Film (well-known premises)

1. When a great white shark begins killing swimmers, a police chief who is afraid of the water must hunt it down before the town's summer economy, and more lives, are lost, despite a mayor who refuses to close the beaches. (Jaws)
2. A washed-up boxer gets a once-in-a-lifetime shot at the heavyweight title and must prove he can go the distance against the champion, even if he cannot win. (Rocky)
3. When her parents are turned into pigs in a spirit world, a timid ten-year-old must work in a bathhouse for gods to win them back before she forgets her own name. (Spirited Away)
4. A retired hitman comes out of retirement to avenge his dog, the last gift from his dead wife, against the son of a crime boss who does not know who he has provoked. (John Wick)
5. A poor family cons its way into working for a wealthy household and must keep the deception alive as the two families' fates become entangled with a secret in the basement. (Parasite)
6. A chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer starts cooking methamphetamine to leave his family money, and must hide it from his DEA-agent brother-in-law as the business consumes him. (Breaking Bad, pilot)
7. When a claustrophobic paramedic is trapped in a collapsed subway tunnel with a patient who is not what he claims to be, she must keep him alive to survive, despite growing evidence he caused the collapse.
8. An ageing forger must complete one last perfect copy of a lost painting to free his daughter from the collector who is holding her, without the collector realising the original was destroyed years ago.
9. When a sleepy coastal town's only doctor discovers the water supply is poisoning the children, she must expose the company that employs half the town before the next school year begins, against a council that would rather not know.
10. A stand-up comedian who has never told a true story on stage must deliver his mother's eulogy at a memorial her family has turned into a roast.

Television (premise plus engine)

11. A hospital nurse discovers her fugitive brother hiding in her house and must keep him concealed from the detective who is also her only friend. Each episode brings the detective closer, and the brother's story further from the truth.
12. Cast out of her order for a heresy she did not commit, a young nun becomes a travelling exorcist for hire in a country where the church has outlawed the practice. Every case is a village with a secret, and every secret points back to the order.
13. A disbarred lawyer runs a legal-advice stall outside the courthouse that convicted him, helping defendants the system has abandoned while quietly building the case that will clear his own name.
14. When a mid-level Korean web novel author discovers her serialised story is coming true, one chapter at a time, she must decide what to write next, knowing that someone is reading ahead.
15. Two rival wedding planners in a small city are forced to merge businesses after a fire, and must run each other's clients' weddings while sabotaging each other's reputations.

Prose (novels and web novels)

16. A woman with a dangerous secret about her marriage is drawn into a disappearance in her town, and the closer she gets to the truth, the more her own life comes apart. (illustrative of the domestic-thriller pattern)
17. Reincarnated into the body of the villainess in the novel she was reading, an office worker must avoid the death the plot has scheduled for her by befriending the heroine who is supposed to destroy her.
18. A regressor who has lived the apocalypse once returns to the day before it began, with the knowledge to survive it and the memory of everyone he failed to save.
19. The last speaker of a dying language is hired to translate a set of letters that reveal the buyer's family fortune was built on the destruction of her people.
20. A newly appointed lighthouse keeper on a rock in the North Sea is told the previous keeper left; then finds his logbook, which insists he never did.

Short and micro (loglines for shorts and one-scene pieces)

21. A man returns a library book forty years late and must explain, to the librarian who has been waiting, what he was doing with it.
22. On the night before her deportation hearing, a cleaner in an empty law office finds the file with her name on it.
23. A boy who has never spoken must ask a stranger for help when his grandmother collapses in a supermarket.
24. Two strangers stuck in a lift discover they are on their way to the same funeral, for different reasons.
25. A widower teaching himself his late wife's recipes discovers the last card in her box is addressed to him.

What the strong examples share

Read numbers 1, 5, 11 and 17 again. Each has a protagonist defined by a tension (afraid of water; poor and pretending; nurse and sister of a criminal; villainess who knows her fate). Each has an inciting event you could film. Each has a goal with a visible end and an opponent capable of escalating. And each leaves the outcome open. That is the entire formula, and the formula is why they work, not their subject matter.

Common mistakes

No protagonist. "In a world where memory can be bought and sold, one city fights back." Cities do not want things. Find the person.

A theme instead of a story. "A meditation on grief and the meaning of home." That is what the story is about, not what happens in it. Loglines describe events.

A name instead of a description. "Mara finds her brother hiding in her house." Who is Mara? "A burnt-out nurse" tells the reader what kind of story this is.

Two protagonists with two goals. Ensemble films still have a logline with one spine. Pick the character whose choice ends the story.

No stakes. "A woman tries to find her missing brother." What if she does not? If the answer is "then she does not", the story is missing its pressure.

Giving away the ending. The logline should provoke the question, not answer it.

Adjectives that describe appearance. "A beautiful young lawyer" tells the reader nothing about the story. "A lawyer who has never lost" does.

Length. Over forty words, the sentence stops being a logline and starts being a synopsis. If the formula produces something too long, the story has too many parts in it; simplify the story, not the sentence.

Using loglines as a writing tool

Beyond pitching, loglines are useful at three points in the writing process:

1. Before outlining. If you cannot write the logline, you do not yet know whose story it is or what they want. Solving that first saves weeks.
2. Before each act. Write a logline for Act Two on its own ("Having hidden her brother, a nurse must keep the detective who is courting her out of the house while the brother's calls reveal he is not done"). If the act does not have its own logline, it does not have its own shape.
3. After the draft. Write the logline of the script you actually wrote and compare it with the one you started with. The difference tells you what the draft became, which is usually more interesting than what you planned, and points to what needs reconciling.

For adaptations the logline is the first test of whether you have found the film inside the book; see our novel-to-screenplay guide. For television, the two-sentence form (premise, then engine) is the standard; see how to write a TV pilot.

Try it in SparkLore

Every SparkLore project begins with a logline field in the story bible, and the outliner uses it as the spine against which the beat sheet and scene cards are checked. If you want to generate candidate loglines from a rough idea and then sharpen one by hand, the free AI script generator produces a logline alongside a sample scene; our plot generator guide explains how to push such output away from the generic. Projects begin when you sign up.