Dramatic Love Story
-OR-
“Determined to get his life back on track, an ex-con falls for the woman who saves his life, but her demons may jeopardize everything he works for.”
"SOMETIMES LOVE" Revised: A man with a checkered past determined to get his life back on track, falls for the woman who saves his life, but her drug addiction and past horrors may jeopardize everything he works for
Share
I think I have it…. but now I’m skurd to post it… lol! I work night shift; 12 hour shifts, and I worked all dang night. I took Karel’s advice and studied and practice the logline techniques from this website, and I think I finally got it. Too bad “When a Man Loves a Woman” is taken because that is the title I would’ve chosen. 😉
Maybe this helps:
“Discovering her problems may be worse than his own, an ex-con second guesses falling for the woman who saved his life.”
-Joey
Well darn, I just can’t win for losing…. (I’m not mad). His goal/premise/desire is to have a family… and I have it clearly SHOWN not told on page 4 of my script… that you are unaware of… I know. Again I’m not mad, just frustrated, trying to squeeze 120 min into 15-20 seconds… However, I’m beginning to grasp the concept a little in ref to inner vs outer goal… the outer is what I need to include in my logline… I’ll keep at it. Lucky for me, I don’t have to add a logline for the Scriptapalooza contest because I would be SOL. But structure… I have studied and practiced and studied some more… so I’m pretty confident with what should happen in the first 10 pages, 30 pages 45-60.. so forth, Twist in Act III, but this logline is kicking my arse. But anyways, I will spend several weeks playing around with mine and others…. practice makes perfect…. or at least better…. and I am grateful, Karel for the feedback… because no feedback, I would just assume it’s okay. 🙂
“A man with a checkered past, determined to get his life back on track”
This is the character setup and the opening situation. The man’s determination is an “inner need”, not an outer, visible goal. It is not clear enough for an audience to have any idea what sort of cinematic story to expect.
“falls for the woman who saves his life”
These are two major events, rolled into one. In the ‘outer journey’ story, his life is saved. In the ‘love journey’, he falls in love. Both can be the inciting incident of the story.
“but her drug addiction …”
This gives us obstacles but not a clear outer goal for our male hero. “To get his life back on track” may be the goal in the mind of the writer but it is too vague and it promises too much inner conflict for an audience to care.
It is very well possible that there is a clear goal but you didn’t include. It is equally possible that your story doesn’t have an ‘outer goal’ for the main character. If this is the case, it may well be a problem as this type of story usually doesn’t work on the screen and it is near impossible to sell them as a beginning screenwriter.
If your story DOES have more going on, then I suggest you study the structure of a good logline here: https://loglines.org/howto
Good luck!