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.