When a man quits his job to get married, only to have his proposal curiously rejected by his girlfriend, he secretly hires a journalist to help him investigate.

1] It is usually better to frame an action or motive of a main character in positive terms rather than negative. ?So rather than ?say”he quits his job”, just say”he starts his own business”. ?Because that is the positive motive for why he quit his job.

2] However, the inciting incident for the plot (and logline) is when she dumps him. ?So the info about his business, while it fleshes out the script,seems extraneous to the logline.. ?If she doesn’t dump him, there’s no plot — or a different plot. The plot you propose begins when (for whatever reason in whatever context) she dumps him.

3a] Why would he hire a journalist rather than a private investigator? Journalists, of course, are supposed to be good at digging up facts, but they’re only amateur private investigators; it’s not their primary job. ?Private investigators are professionals; they’re ?supposed to be better. ?As private investigator Jake Gittes says in “Chinatown”, that’s their metier.

3b]And certainly a professional would cost more than an amateur, a starving journalist, as you characterize him in a previous iteration of the logline. ?And that’s the way it should be: the amount of money he is willing to invest to get the job done right (by a pro not a starving amateur) is the measure of his suffering, his desire to get her back– or at least get revenge.

IMHO: if the protagonist is the kind of guy who would go cheap on investigating her, he doesn’t deserve her. ?I ?am less inclined to sympathize with his plight.

4] And I repeat my earlier qualm: ?the logline seems to pass the baton of the plot off to the person investigating her. ?Such that if Act 1 is about?the jilted lover, ?Act 2, the bulk of the story,?seems to be about the investigation, which is the work of another character. ?So the focus of the plot shifts from one character to another.

If the objective goal of the plot is to find out why she dumped him, then it seems to me that perhaps she is the main character. ?Perhaps the logline ?and script should be framed around her.

Whatever, who owns the story? ? ?What is the story really about? ?I don’t know.