Workshopping your loglines - the do-over! Plus 5 ways to "cheat" your summary material

For those of you who sent in loglines-- thank you! But I kinda sorta need for you to share them with me again.

Welcome to Friday office hours! This is a section of my newsletter where I workshop the writing of paying subscribers. Before Thanksgiving, I put out an open call for loglines (one sentence summaries of your book-length projects) and boy, did you deliver. Similarly to what happened when I put out an open call for writing from the point of view of children, I got well over a hundred emails sharing your fine work.

Here’s the thing: not only is it tricky for me to wade through hundreds of emails to choose a few examples that I want to use on my Substack, but also these exchanges are happening off stage. I think it’s more useful for people to see each other’s projects in the comments and for me to weigh in there, so that other writers can benefit from that feedback, too.

Because I don’t want to leave you without content on this first Friday of December, I’m going to workshop a handful of your loglines here, but the main thrust of this post is to ask you to please re-share the following in the comments section of this post if you’d like to have your logline workshopped:¹

• The title and genre of your book/story.

• A super brief description of what your project is about (doesn’t have to be well written, more important to keep it super short!)

• Your logline in one sentence. For a refresher on what a logline is and what it should do, please revisit my post on loglines. (I included two examples of loglines there, the classic elevator pitch and the XY formula.)

Having your writing workshopped is a privilege reserved for paying subscribers. Please upgrade if you’d like to join us in this logline workshop, and beyond!

And please do accept my apologies for having to re-share your material in a new format. I’ve been wrestling with this and hate leaving your emails unanswered. Although I love Substack, like you, I’m learning what I’m capable of delivering (and not capable of delivering) as I go.

Now on to some of your loglines!

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Logline 1: Historical romance

This first logline is from subscriber Emma. Here’s what Emma sent in:

Title/genre: Historical romance

Short description: STRANGE BEDFELLOWS is an adult historical romance featuring two queer male protagonists set during the 1807 London Season. One of them is seeking a wife due to family pressure and working with Bow Street to track down a jewel thief. The other one is the jewel thief, who is seeking revenge on the countess who forced his first lover out of the country. They fall in love, end up at the countesses house party where Ashley is set to steal a necklace, and then Henry finds out the identity of the thief. 

Classic Logline: During the 1807 London season Henry Cavendish, country gentleman and Bow Street police informant, falls hard for earl's son Ashley Montagu, and then discovers he is the jewel thief Henry has been tracking for years. 

XY Formula: Bridgerton, but make it gay. 

I followed up with Emma because I wanted to understand whether her book was set in an alternate historical period where homosexuality was tolerated, but Emma explained that it wasn’t, that “being in a queer relationship was both unacceptable and dangerous.” Those stakes are cued up in the short description (“seeking a wife due to family pressure”) but we lose them in the logline. Emma’s classic logline reads as if the biggest problem with Henry falling for Ashley is that Ashley turns out to be a crook that Henry has been tracking, but I think (if Emma can do it in one sentence!) the emphasis should first be given to the danger of this romance culturally and socially, followed by the ethical danger Henry faces by falling for a thief.

I love Emma’s XY Formula, the only thing I think it’s missing is the book’s specific setting. Which is why I humbly propose: It's BRIDGERTON during the 1807 London season- but gay.

Here are all your loglines waiting in my inbox. Photo by Ibrahim Rifath on Unsplash

Example 2: Fiction

Title/genre: SEED, upmarket fiction

Short description: Justin Seed, 29, is an average guy who finds himself in an extraordinarily uncomfortable position. For reasons no one understands (though theories about environmental toxicity abound), he is the first among legions of young men suddenly harboring life. The reader follows Justin’s quixotic journey in search of answers—and a cure. Along the way, he gets caught up in political forces way out of his league, as influential powerbrokers seize upon this poster child to ram through laws that will (yet again) empower white men to put their own needs (abortion on demand, for guys) ahead of everyone else’s. The Supreme Court will see to it, especially with pregnant guys dying left and right under mysterious circumstances. Justin ultimately is relieved of his pregnancy and dedicates himself, in gratitude, to celebrate others who are reinventing themselves after a traumatic experience.

Classic logline: SEED follows one man’s disorienting experience with an absurd biological destiny, while throwing a harsh light on the ways power and privilege create winners and losers in today’s America.

If you’ve ever had a coaching session with me, you’ll know I value clarity over mystery, especially in summary documents like pitches and query letters. That’s why in this example from subscriber Amy, I’d love to replace the phrases “uncomfortable position” and “absurd biological destiny” with “pregnancy.” The lede shouldn’t be buried: dudes are getting pregnant in this novel, and people don’t know why. It would be one thing if this novel reimagined a world in which men getting pregnant was the norm, but SEED isn’t doing that—the male pregnancies are an abnormality, and the men are freaking out. I would use simpler language in the classic logline, is what I’m saying. I love the title of this novel and how the author is using satire to criticize (and hopefully better) the ongoing attacks on womens’ reproductive health.

Example 3: Memoir

Title/Genre: ATOMIC, Memoir

Short description: My memoir, ATOMIC, is part coming-of-age and part father-daughter story, with a backdrop of 70s child abandonment, the Cold War, and punk rock. The book begins when I am seven and my parents unexpectedly divorce, exploding my family and stranding me with a verbally abusive stepmother. My kind but distant father is off in fighter planes, in cop cars, and on motorcycles sidestepping nukes and death, while my mom lives far away—our visits loving but infrequent. I learn to cope by altering my visual perceptions, creating a shift in my head that makes the world seem expansive and beautiful whenever I need. This leads to my exploration of LSD and altered states as a teen, moving to NYC, playing in a queer band, and teaching yoga. Throughout, I’m terrified my dad will suddenly die without knowing me, and yet I can barely manage a phone conversation with him. After 9/11, I experience a mental crisis and my dad has a near-fatal heart attack. With his chest sawed open and the invasion of Iraq fresh on the hospital TV, he finally tells me for real about the Vietnam war, while I tell him about the shattered landscape in my head. We are both shocked into revealing deeper truths to each other, and I finally feel seen and understood by him as a whole person. My book is Hollywood Park meets Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. ATOMIC renders an anxious child, a quantum beauty seeker, and a weirdo misfit just trying to get along in the same body. It is a lyrical exploration of family and self and creating bridges between the two, especially when divorce and C-PTSD rewrite the scope of childhood. 

The working log line²: Robin wants to feel seen by her loving yet absent Air Force father, but she is abandoned to a verbally abusive stepmother, so to feel good in the world Robin relies on altered headspaces both of her own imagination and, later, through drugs, yoga, and playing in a queercore band. All seems to be working, but right after 9/11 Robin experiences a mental crisis and her dad has a near-fatal heart attack, leading them to finally connect for real in the hospital.

It’s not easy to put your memoir summary out there for a group of strangers, so thank you for sharing this with us, Robin!

Memoir is hard to write a quick summary of because nothing about memoir feels “quick” or “easy” to the person writing it. I can’t say that I was one hundred percent sure what my own memoir was about until the reviews started coming in and other people told me what they thought it was about.

Which is why when you have too long of a summary, like Robin does, the best thing you can do is look to your north stars and see how they summarized their work. Robin’s lead comp title for her book is T Kira Madden’s “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls”³ which, like Robin’s book, is a twisty and complex narrative with a lot of jumps in time. The best thing that Robin can do to streamline her summary material is to see how Madden’s team did it for hers.

Sometimes we get lucky, and a book’s paperback edition has a summary line printed on the cover. Othertimes (equally lucky) the book’s description has a summary line in bold. Barring this, we can peruse the blurbs for one-liners. Searching for said one-liners is the only time that I encourage using Amazon. (If you’ve read my second novel, TOUCH you’ll understand why I’m anti-Amazon. Bezos makes over a million dollars an hour. Please consider giving your money to local shop owners instead of Amazon this holiday season. I’ll get off my soapbox now.)

Let’s do this mining exercise together for LONG LIVE using cheats that you can use when you need help summarizing your own book:

• Is there a bolded one-liner about the book in its description? No.

• One-liner on the paperback? No.

• One-liner we can pull out from the descriptive copy? Not exactly, but there is this golden nugget that tees up the book’s title: “Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.”

• Does the film exist? And if so what’s the logline for the film? I know an adaptation is in process but it hasn’t hit the screens yet.

• Any useable one-liners in the blurbs? While I didn’t find one perfect line, there are glowing fragments we can put together into a logline of our own:

Coming of age as a biracial queer teenager in Boca Raton, Florida.⁴

Facing a culture of assault and objectification.⁵

It’s a story of loving addicts.

Of a queer sexual awakening.

Of inhabiting a female body in America.

It’s about girls and the women they become.⁶

To me, queerness, coming-of-age, depravity and sexuality feel like the principle concerns that Madden’s memoir deals with, which is why I chose the above blurb excerpts. What if we make a little logline salad with them?

LONG LIVE is the story of a biracial queer teenager coming of age to addict parents in Boca Raton, Florida in a body that is a source of celebration and a target for assault written by a celebrated essayist and daughter to the late celebrity shoemaker Steve Madden.

I put this logline in the third person and included the bit about the author’s father not only to pump up the marketability of the book, but also to indicate that the author’s father has passed—that perhaps that passing is something the book grapples with. If you yourself are pitching your memoir to someone (especially in-person at a conference) you should speak in the first person, not third.

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LONG LIVE is a book that’s out there and available while Robin’s memoir isn’t (yet!). Regardless though, I hope you receive the following takeaways from the exercise above:

• Your logline (and summary paragraph also!) can not hold everything that’s in your book. You need to whittle your themes down to the book’s principle concerns and summarize from there.

• Revisit the summary material of your comp titles (one-liners on the jacket copy or in the blurbs) for inspiration on how to do this. I don’t mean that you should cop actual phrases from other people’s blurbs— what I mean is you should look to descriptive copy and blurbs about your comp titles to understand how to better encapsulate what your own book is about.

• The right book title can do a LOT of heavy lifting in terms of communicating your theme, especially in memoir! What if “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls” was called “The Orange City”? Intriguing, but would you know what it’s about? Revisit my post on titling tips if you need assistance on that front.

Okay, so back to Robin! I’ve read (and loved) Madden’s memoir while all I’ve read from Robin is the summary section you’ve now read also, so it’s impossible (and inappropriate) for me to pick the “main thing” that Robin’s book is about. But I will say that her summary is a ten lane highway, and we need to close a lot of lanes. I’ll also say that with memoir being hard to sell right now, it’s wise to pick out what’s unique and “ownable” about her project. To my mind, the “altered vision” piece of this memoir is super interesting—and with the right title (one that speaks to altered states of perception and/or vision) the summary could be tweaked to celebrate how altered states of consciousness allowed Robin to navigate an extremely rocky childhood.

A title like “Altered States: A Girlhood” might do the trick and make it a heck of a lot clearer to Robin and her future readers what the memoir is about. One-word titles are exceptionally hard to pull off⁷, especially for debuts when book buyers aren’t yet familiar with your take and your aesthetics.

Those are my two cents!

Thank you so much to Emma, Amy and Robin for having the courage to have their loglines workshopped here. Please, no negative comments on any of their loglines— we’re all here to support each other, to celebrate the art of writing, and to learn from one another, but we’re not here to drag each other down.

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Remember: if you sent me a logline previously and you’d still like me to weigh in on it, please follow the above guidelines and re-post it in the comments. If you’re new here, and you’d like to roll your logline in, please do! If you’re tempted to join in our workshops, please upgrade to paid.

I hope to get to everybody’s loglines. Let’s see how this new sharing format goes.⁸

In whatever way you’re showing up, thanks for being here!

1. This includes people that I emailed about possibly using their logline in my Substack— I apologize for the inconvenience of sharing your work with me again!

2. Robin wrote (and said that I could share) that she doesn’t like this logline, which feels bulky to her and possibly too plot-based.

3. I often use affiliate links to the indie bookstore supporter Bookshop.org in my posts, but I never use them for my own books.

4. From a review in Entertainment Weekly.

5. From the book’s jacket copy.

6. These last four excerpts are from the New York Times review of TRIBE.

7. I like SEED though— brava, Amy!

8. I reserve the right not to workshop material that I find offensive. If I want to more deeply explore someone’s submitted logline in a dedicated Substack, I’ll get in touch with the writer via email for permission. Please be patient as I make my way through your submissions.