How to Create Compelling Pitches and Loglines
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When a tornado spirits a girl away to a fantastic land, she must retrieve a broom belonging to a wicked witch in order to learn to secret to returning home again.
An archeologist must battle Nazis to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant before Hitler can use it to achieve world domination.
A boy journeys through a strange land in his dreams and learns to befriend the monsters there before he can appreciate his home and family.
Any of those sound familiar? These are all examples of loglines of famous stories.
Last week I talked about preparing for the query process and searching for an agent. This week I’m going to talk about pitches and loglines - i.e., the way to “sell your story in a single sentence” in the words of Lane Shefter Bishop, who wrote an excellent book with that title. I encourage you to check it out for lots of examples and exercises.
Not every writer is looking to publish traditionally, but this post will be beneficial to indie writers as well. When someone asks you what your book is about, you don’t want to waffle around, saying, “Well, it’s about this girl, and she gets carried away by a twister – but first she has this dog, and she lives on a farm – but the girl runs away and then a twister comes, and she gets transported to this crazy land and...” Watch your listener’s eyes glaze over. Or while you are writing the blurb to sell your book on Amazon, it needs to be concise and compelling right away, or people will click on past.
What is a pitch, or logline?
It is, simply, your story boiled down to no more than a sentence or two. It is also known as the “hook” which hooks the agent in a query letter into reading the rest of the mini-synopsis of the query. It has one goal: the get the reader (or listener, if you’re giving it live) to say, “Tell me more!”
It begins with your premise. And in fact, it’s a fantastic way to tweak your premise before you even start writing (or certainly, before you start revising). If you can’t wrestle it down into something clear and compelling, you know the idea isn’t quite right yet.
The formula is:
CHARACTER has GOAL or PROBLEM that needs to be solved or CONSEQUENCES/STAKES.
Example: A princess must recover her kingdom’s stolen gold before she has to marry a rich, evil sorcerer to save her people.
An example of mine: A disinherited prince must fight magical demons, an undead army, and his own uncle to become the first Pharaoh of a united Egypt, before the god of chaos destroys it.
A few others you might recognize:
When a tornado spirits a girl away to a fantastic land, she must retrieve a broom belonging to a wicked witch in order to learn to secret to returning home again. (The Wizard of Oz)
An archeologist must battle Nazis to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant before Hitler can use it to achieve world domination. (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
A boy journeys through a strange land and learns to befriend the monsters there before he can appreciate his home and family. (Where the Wild Things Are)
As you can see in these examples, the details are pared right down. An easy way to practice is to try coming up with loglines for your favorite books or movies. With your own story, you can become bogged down in the details. With someone else’s, you have the distance to see the main elements clearly.
Note that although some details are left vague, other elements are vividly clear. Not just a man or a professor, but “an archeologist” must find not “a treasure” but “the Ark of the Covenant” or not the villain but “Hitler” will take over the world. Knowing what vivid details to keep and which are too much is part of the practice.
The longline helps you hone your premise.
As I mentioned, writing the logline is also a good way to see how your premise stacks up. If you find yourself writing a logline or premise that doesn’t match your actual story, that is a big red flag – or green flag, depending on how you look at it. A vague or underwhelming logline can signal an underwhelming story. If you can’t identify the clear conflict and stakes, chances are the reader won’t be able to either.
You may even come up with a logline or premise that’s better than what you currently have – and that’s great! You can make changes that you know will strengthen your story.
No way can I do this!
You may be thinking, “My story is WAY too complicated to distill into a sentence or two.” Nope. Any story can have a logline. Multiple-volume series can have a logline. Just try it.
Or you may think loglines are only for genre fiction, or only for fiction, period, and you’re writing a memoir. But every story needs a main character with a goal or problem, and stakes if they don’t achieve the goal or solve the problem. If your book doesn’t have these, you’re writing something experimental – which is fine as long you understand that is what you are doing,
Where can you use your logline?
In your query, as a hook to entice the agent to learn more.
In a live pitch session at a conference.
At a Twitter/X pitch fest – many of these are still TBA owing to the transition from Twitter to X, but there is one for picture book writers coming up on Feb. 22. A great list of currently known and possible pitch fests, with websites, is here. Even if they aren’t sponsoring a pitch fest, many of the organizations are worth checking out, espcially sicne they often focus on supporting specific groups of writers, such API, disabled, Black, or queer indie writers.
To test your premise (see above).
When someone asks about your story.
In short, don’t skip the logline step. It’s a small but mighty piece of selling your work to an agent, or an editor, or the public.
Excellent resources for writing loglines:
http://agentquery.com/writer_hq.aspx - has many great examples of hooks and how to construct a query letter (this site is also a fantastic source for agent research).
Graeme Shimmin’s Killogator.
The YA Writer’s Toolbox has a great set of pitch generators. They ask questions about your story and come up possible ideas. You can focus on romance, high stakes, character journey, or world/setting. Not just for YA! I tried it and some are nonsense, but several gave me new perspectives on my story.
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