In my last post, I mentioned a writers workshop I went to on the coast. One of the presenters was a horror writer/director named Duncan Birmingham. His movie Who Invited Them? is on Hulu, and definitely worth a watch if you’re into unsettling, off putting stories.

Duncan’s presentation involved what he called “unpacking the suitcase.” It’s a theory you may have heard before, and it goes kind of like this: if you’re feeling bogged down or overwhelmed, take your story and reduce it down to a sentence or two. Duncan referred to it as your logline. At its heart, what is your story really about? Stripping everything down to its essence can help you focus and get back to the core of the story.

He explained that a logline has three key elements, plus a few others he called bonus elements. The key elements are: PROTAGONIST—GOAL—ANTAGONIST. Your protagonist wants something and someone or something is stopping them. That’s it. Even if the protagonist is completely passive and reactive, they still want something, even if it’s just for whatever they’re going through to stop.

What Duncan called the bonus elements were these: stakes, method, irony, time and space squeeze, and why now? Stakes is fairly self-explanatory, same with method. He defined irony as being how a protagonist’s particular trait or knowledge, oftentimes something very niche, could help them reach their goal or get them out of a perilous predicament en route to reaching their goal. Time and space squeeze is one you’ll see a lot—it’s some kind of constraint put on the protagonist. Maybe there’s a ticking clock (figuratively and sometimes literally), or they’re stuck in a particular location with no way to get out or reach help. Whatever it is, it puts limits on the protagonist to stack the odds against them. The last one, why now, just sort of applies or it doesn’t. Either your story is especially timely or it’s timeless. Sometimes the answer to “Why now?” is simply “Why not now?”

As I said earlier, other people have mentioned similar methods for keeping from straying too far from what your story is about, or getting bogged down in minutiae. I recall reading once about a prominent author (I can’t for the life of me remember who) that wrote a very short (2-3 sentence) synopsis on a post-it note and stuck it to their monitor so they could look at it whenever they felt like they needed reassurance. I’ve never tried that, but I have caught myself straying from the core of a story before, and had to stop and remind myself what I was working toward. I might just try it—having a logline to look at when I need a reset. What works for you?