Desperation leads a 14-year-old teenage girl to engage in self-destructive activity out of desire to detach her consciousness from her reality but when death appears her only solace, her creator shows up to declares her value and saves her.

I see 3 major problems with this logline. Two of them are obvious and typical errors in logline posted here. The third is not so common and may be peculiar to the story theme.

The two obvious and common errors are:

1) As Dkpough1 pointed out, there is no clear plot line. There is no obvious inciting incident. The nature of her destructive behavior is vague. And she is presented as a hopeless victim of her inner demons (metaphorically speaking) and vices.

But a protagonist is supposed to be proactively struggling for a positive objective goal even when wrestling with personal demons. To quote again the acclaimed screenwriter Walter Bernstein: ?The audience empathizes with a character not because they are in pain or oppressed, but because of what they are doing about it. To which I would add: And because of what they are doing in spite of it.

So, while it is necessary, it is not sufficient for her to be suffering. She must also be struggling toward an objective goal because of her suffering or in spite of it.

What is that objective goal?

2] The logline contains a spoiler; it gives away the ending, how the dramatic problem is solved. This is something a logline should never do. And the nature of the spoiler segues to the 3rd major problem.

3] The spoiler is that the dramatic problem is solved by a literal deus ex machina. The phrase literally means ?god from a machine?. The phrase originates from Greek and Roman drama where a god descended from a stage apparatus at the climax of the play to save the protagonist from a predicament ?instead of having the character save himself.

Modern drama rejects the use of deus ex machina solutions. Modern drama insists that characters work out their own objective solution and their own subjective salvation. Which creates a special challenge in Christian-themed redemption narratives ? which I infer this story to be ? where salvation comes through grace, not by works, where a happy ending to the story is a gift, not a reward.

It is beyond the scope of the focus of this web site to suggest a work around for that conundrum. ?Because how the dramatic problem is resolved, deus ex machina or otherwise, ?doesn’t belong in a logline. ?To repeat, a logline should never reveal the solution to the dramatic problem whether it is earned or gifted, ?natural or supernatural in origin.

fwiw