Diane Perry the sickly daughter of an East End Fishmonger searches for perfection. She will find faith in the East, but only one Eastern monk will find faith in her.

LOGLINE:
A crippled young woman joins a Tibetan monastery in India, the only nun among 1,000 monks, and struggles to win acceptance as a spiritual equal.

25 words. The story defenestrated of its convoluted story line and complex themes.

NOTES:

OBJECTIVE GOAL:
Some may object that “win acceptance as a spiritual equal” is too vague to be an objective goal. Perhaps, but the struggle to attain that goal can be visually demonstrated to an audience with before and after scenes, gestures, dialogue, etc. that dramatize the peripety from discrimination and rejection to equality and acceptance.

CHARACTER FLAW:
The logline convention is to tag the protagonist with a character flaw, a vice, a weakness from which can be inferred the transformation character arc (the explication of which is beyond the scope of a logline). That the protagonist in this story has scoliosis is a physical flaw — but it is not a character flaw.

I have a somewhat heterodoxic concept of the “flaw”. IMHO, in some stories what constitutes the “flaw” is a matter of context. That is, an character quality that is a noble virtue, and admirable strength in one context — or at least a neutral quality — can be a fatal flaw, a debilitating weakness in another.

So what is the protagonist’s “flaw” in the context of the cultural milieu and traditional praxis of the monastery?

She’s female.

Which, of course, is no flaw at all. Ironically and perversely, it is the monks who hold the bag of the “character flaw”. And consequently, while the protagonist must engage in a spiritual battle within, externally and objectively her antagonists are the monks and their bigotry.

Bec:

While I greatly esteem the teachings and praxis of Buddhism, I’m dubious about the ability to dramatize its profound essence, certainly to a mass audience. I defer to others who may be more enlightened on the task.

Searching for perfection is a noble –and delusional — quest. It is also a quest to fulfill a subjective need. A perfect state of being — what does that look like on a movie screen?

Loglines are about objective goals, about objects sought [the buried gold] or actions achieved [crossing the finish line first] that provide visual confirmation to the audience that the goal has been reached. Objective goals are means to subjective ends, but in a logline the focus is on the objective, not the subjective.

So what is her objective goal— the means — to fulfilling her subjective need for perfection?
What is at stake? What happens if she fails to reach her objective goal?
Who and/or what opposes her, stands in the way of getting what she wants?