A newly engaged woman realizes she spent all her childhood searching for love and no time making friends. Determined to ?have it all?, she sets out to find friends and discovers it?s much harder now as an adult.

One screenwriting guru divides stories into “masculine mode” and “feminine mode”. ?”Masculine mode” stories are about a protagonist (male or female) striving to achieve an objective goal. ?”Feminine mode” stories are about a protagonist (female more likely, but male, too) seeking to build or repair a relationship, romantic or otherwise.

Putting aside the issue of ?sexist stereotyping for the ?moment, this seems to be a distinctly “feminine mode” story, a story that focuses on relationship problems. ?Consequently, describing this story in the format of a logline entails a general challenge as well as a particular problem.

The general challenge is that logline formula is better suited to describing “masculine mode” stories because that’s the mode of most movies (even with a female protagonist.) ?The industry standard ?logline formula describes a protagonist pursuing an objective goal against an antagonist and sundry obstacles. ?Relationship issues may be an important part of the story as a whole, but they are extraneous to a logline.

IOW: ?the standard logline formula was not designed to describe relationship stories.

The particular problem with this logline is that it lacks specificity, details that make it stand out from all the other stories about a protagonist?who?has been looking for romantic love and needs non-romantic friendship.

For instance, whether the story is “masculine” or “feminine” mode, it should be triggered by an inciting incident. ?And that inciting incident needs to be part of the logline. ?However, this logline is unclear as to what the specific incident is that triggers the character’s realization and reorientation of her action.

Is the inciting incident the engagement, the pending marriage? ?And if so, why would it trigger her realization? ?Does she discover she has no female friends to be bride maids? ?Even though that’s a female version of the groom’s predicament in “I love You, Man” and “The Wedding Ringer”, there may be a good comedy in it because it goes against the stereotype, that women are better at friendships than men.

And in both of those best man movies, the plot is actually a combination of “female” and “male” modes: ?the guys need to find authentic male friendship (solve a relationship problem) in order to achieve an objective goal (have a best man to stand by them on the wedding day).

For lack of sufficient details, that is my general suggestion m.o. for constructing a logline for your story.

fwiw