When a strange new man enters his irresponsible mother’s life, and his father returns from rehab, a teenage boy’s life is rocked to its core as he deals with a traumatic and violent event in his past and coming to terms with his complicated sexuality.

There is obviously a lot of dramatic potential in this logline. ?And ?it is appropriately described as a coming of age story.

However, it seems to me this version of the logline buries the lead, the hook. ?The lead, the hook is “he deals with a traumatic and violent event in his past and coming to terms with his complicated sexuality.”

And to mash metaphors, the logline also hides the ball: “a violent and traumatic past” can mean anything and everything and so means nothing in terms of explaining how the new man in his mother’s life constitutes an inciting incident, how there is cause and effect between that event and his life being “rocked to the core” — and again, that’s hiding the game ball. “Rocked to the core” can mean anything and everything and so means nothing to a logline reader.

Finally, the logline presents the teenager as a 100% victim of circumstances; he is besieged from without by grownups and besieged, seemingly betrayed, from within by his biology. ?That’s great! ?Compelling raw material for a ?coming of age story.

But, alas, it offers no clue, no suggestion of what he struggles do about it.

IOW: the logline sets up a problematical ?situation ; now it needs to delineate a plot. ?A plot?is a narrative arranged in a causal sequence of events wherein a protagonist struggles for an objective goal. In conventional drama, a protagonist is someone who when handed a bag of lemons, struggles to squeeze lemonade out of them.

As a result of finding himself in this complicated situation, what becomes the teenage boy’s objective goal? ?What does he decide to do about it? ?What becomes his m.o. to squeeze lemonade out of these lemons?

fwiw