All the action in the world will not make your story better. Just look at recent Hollywood bombs like “Argylle”, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”, or “Borderlands”. What makes action meaningful is how it affects your hero’s goal.
Stories are really about Action + Emotion. To grab attention, you need a killer log line that summarizes your story and tells a compelling story such as:
- “Jaws” – A shark terrorizes beach goers at a summer resort.
- “A Quiet Place” – A family tries to survive in a devastated world where blind monsters hunt by sound.
- “Don’t Breathe” – Burglars break into a blind man’s home, only to find themselves trapped in his house as he hunts them down one by one.
Notice that a log line tells what a story is about and often reveals something we’ve probably never seen before such as blind monsters in “A Quiet Place” or a blind man hunting down burglars in “Don’t Breathe”.
However, creating a killer log line that tells what your story is will never be enough. You must also create an emotional log line that defines how the action challenges your hero emotionally.
In “Jaws”, the hero is the police chief who’s afraid of water but who’s motivated to kill the shark to make up for his mistake in opening the beaches where the shark killed a little boy. Notice that this emotional log line is difficult to achieve precisely because of some detail in the physical log line. In this case, the hero is afraid of water but has to hunt and kill a shark out in the water.
In “A Quiet Place”, the hero are the different members of the family who must keep quiet to avoid attracting the blind monsters. Ironically, by keeping quiet, the family members aren’t able to tell each other how much they love one another.
In “Don’t Breathe”, the hero is a young woman who wants to rob enough houses to get enough money so she can take her little sister away from their abusive mother and start a new life for themselves.
Notice that the physical log line of the story always provides a way for the hero to achieve their emotional log line. But without an emotional log line, you have half a story that’s likely to go nowhere.
So the first step to creating a killer story is to focus on telling an interesting, compelling story with a detail that we’ve never seen before (blind monsters in “A Quiet Place” or being trapped and hunted by a blind man inside his house in “Don’t Breathe”).
Once you’ve crafted a killer log line that describes your story, the second step is to come up with an emotional log line that defines your hero’s goal and how that goal is even harder to achieve based on the unique details of your physical log line.
Create an interesting log line and you’ll grab somebody’s attention, but you won’t have a clue how to tell a compelling story. Creating an interesting log line that defines your story, and create an emotional log line that defines what your hero wants emotionally is what defines a complete story.
Nobody cares about your emotional log line. Everyone only cares about the physical log line so feel free to keep your emotional log line tucked out of sight. Just as long as you know what it is, you’ll be able to combine it with the physical log line to define an emotionally charged and meaningful story.
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