3rd attempt (thank you for the reviews so far!) A carefree rebellious writer’s life turns upside down when his long lost friend crashes at his place for a month, depressed and suicidal. The friend goes missing after a month, leaving behind an email to the writer’s inbox : his suicide note. The writer vows to stop him from taking his own life, and reunite him with his separated daughter.

Foxtrot25 is right.

You got 10 seconds, 15 max to grab and hold a logline reader's eyeballs. ?Movie makers are busy people with short attention spans and innumerable distractions (like smartphones that clamor for their attention 100 or more times a day). ?They aren't going to slog their way through 60 words.

Boiled down to its essence, ? the story is about a writer who must stop a friend from committing suicide. ?That's 10 words. ?The rest of the verbiage is embellishment.

And this story needs embellishment -- spicing up -- to make the "bland" ?story more appealing. ?But ?you don't have the luxury of piling on 50 extra words. ? That's an inconvenient truth, but a truth about how the business works.

As someone who has served on a hotline, struggled for hours to talk people out of suicide, I think there is powerful story lurking in your premise waiting to be told. ?But, for myself, I'm not hooked on this story.

But I want to be.

fwiw

Foxtrot25 is right.

You got 10 seconds, 15 max to grab and hold a logline reader's eyeballs. ?Movie makers are busy people with short attention spans and innumerable distractions (like smartphones that clamor for their attention 100 or more times a day). ?They aren't going to slog their way through 60 words.

Boiled down to its essence, ? the story is about a writer who must stop a friend from committing suicide. ?That's 10 words. ?The rest of the verbiage is embellishment.

And this story needs embellishment -- spicing up -- to make the "bland" ?story more appealing. ?But ?you don't have the luxury of piling on 50 extra words. ? That's an inconvenient truth, but a truth about how the business works.

As someone who has served on a hotline, struggled for hours to talk people out of suicide, I think there is powerful story lurking in your premise waiting to be told. ?But, for myself, I'm not hooked on this story.

But I want to be.

fwiw

I believe that you are still not writing this properly. What you have here is more of a pitch than a hook (or a log) and you need to zero in on 1-2 sentences, perferably 1, and lock the reader into your story.

It's like the quick passover on the channel listings on tv, before you hit the info button to get even more of a story paragraph.