Thank you so much for taking the time to respond (and so thoroughly). Your advice (as with everything on this site) is invaluable! I am a huge fan of the work you do here for all of us, Thank you.

My suggestion for this would be to come up with a list of books that are similar in style to yours. Then look them up to find out how they’re described. IT sounds like Harold and the Purple Crayon might be a similar one, and I found this line of description on a post highlighting books for preschoolers: This is the story of pint-sized dreamer Harold, who one day decides to go for a walk and creates a whole world of adventures using nothing but his creativity and a purple crayon.

Here’s another for The Giving Tree: This story of lifelong friendship between a boy and a tree teaches a wonderful lesson in selflessness and unconditional love. Good Night Moon is another one that you could look into, since that sounds like what you’re talking about.

I’m going rogue here, not having researched this at all, but with this kind of book there seems to be a strong emotional component——something that tugs at readers’ heartstrings in some way or is easily identifiable for them: the beloved nighttime ritual that all parents and kids intimately know; a story of lifetime friendship and unconditional love; the creativity and bravery of being able to spawn whole worlds with one simple crayon. Maybe, for this type of story, you need to hone in on that component and make sure that comes through in your log line, since that is what will draw readers in. So I would do a lot of research into books that are similar in concept to yours. Find their summaries and tweak them to get them down to that bare-bones sentence or two. Then do the same to yours. I hope this helps!

Thank you! This is very helpful (and I’ll definitely check out IMDB). If I may add to the challenge though, I write PBs where the plot for a concept book may be as simple as different kinds of quiet (e.g. THE QUIET BOOK).

What I’m struggling with in crafting a logline is precisely that there are no stakes per se in this kind of story. It’s purely an emotional journey with nothing to lose (except the reader if you bore them 😉 but that’s beside the point).

I suppose that’s one way to think about it… the stakes are not in the story itself but in the reader who will either delight (or not) in one’s words. How then, does one formulate a logline for that…?!

This is a great question and one I didn’t consider, since I write (and tend to read) character-driven stories where the character arc is an important piece. With concept, or plot-driven, stories, the pieces are usually still the same, but the stakes are higher——survival, life or death, the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it kind of stakes. The stakes here are so obvious that they’re often implied rather than overtly stated in the log line.

Watership Down: A group of rabbits (protagonists) flee their doomed warren and face many dangers to find and protect their new home (goal, stakes: survival).
War of the Worlds: As Earth is invaded by alien tripod fighting machines, one family (protagonists) fights for survival (goal, stakes).
The Maze Runner: Thomas (protagonist) is deposited in a community of boys after his memory is erased, soon learning they’re all trapped in a maze that will require him to join forces with fellow “runners” for a shot at escape (goal, implied stakes: freedom)

If you’ve written a plot-driven story and want more info on log lines, I would suggest going to IMDB.com and plugging in the titles for plot-driven movies to see how those log lines have been written. I hope this helps!

Dave

Hi, Patrick. Great questions. Yes, a log line is like a story synopsis, except that a synopsis is very detailed and a log line is short and concise. It’s meant to convey what the story is about in a short and snappy fashion. Book jackets, promo snippets, back cover copy and all of those are also forms of the story synopsis, but again, they’re longer; they’re able to share more information about the story because of their length. One of the beautiful things about the log line is that we’re forced to trim all the fat and narrow that synopsis down to the bare bones of what the story is truly about. And this is what you need if you’re pitching a story face-to-face. Someone who asks you what your book is about doesn’t want to hear the entire synopsis. The same goes for the editor or agent you met at the conference who asked you the same question. They might request a synopsis at some point, but when you’re chatting with someone, you need a concise sentence that gives the gist of your story. This is the purpose of a log line. I hope that helps!