One Sentence

I was having a discussion with my critique partners the other day, and one of them, Matt Witten, mentioned how he expands on a concept before he embarks on the year-long process of writing a novel. He writes a sentence. Then he asks people if they like it. Then he expands it to a paragraph, a one pager, a full synopsis, asking opinions at every turn.

Brilliant! We writers come with a built in focus group–each other. I hope you have a few trusted buddies you can turn to and run your wild ideas past. And in case you don’t, here are some ideas of where to find some and how to handle them when you do.

But that was not what really caught me. It was his way of writing that one sentence. It’s not a logline (I have information on loglines at the end of this post). It’s a sentence with strong verbs and contrasting themes working against each other. There’s no stakes in this sentence. But it’s so effective.

Here’s the example he gave me, using the TV Show House:

Doctor who hates people saves lives by investigating mysterious illnesses.

I was immediately interested. This is not a logline! But boy does it sound interesting.

I immediately started thinking about the books I read recently (and loved, more on them in another post).

Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House:

A young woman whose ability to see dead people has ruined her life, accepts an offer from a Yale University secret society to protect it from ghosts.

Liz Moore’s God of the Woods:

Young girl disappears from the same Adirondack camp from which her brother vanished thirteen years earlier.

Kristin Hannah’s The Women:

Privileged young woman saves lives in Vietnam as an Army nurse and comes back to a country that dismisses, disbelieves, or straight up hates her for her service.

Then I started cobbling together a sentence for my own WIP. It was not easy. And it showed me a weakness in my concept that can be easily fixed, but that can cause my novel to be diffuse if I don’t.

So, okay, since we talked about things that are NOT loglines, let’s talk loglines. I suggest you have both.

Here, I give you, the logline formula (courtesy Holly Bodger)

When [MAIN CHARACTER] [INCITING INCIDENT], he/she [CONFLICT]. And if he/she doesn’t [GOAL] he/she will [CONSEQUENCES].

What’s your sentence? I want to know!

Emilya Naymark

Emilya Naymark is the author of the novels Hide in Place and Behind the Lie.
Her short stories appear in the Bouchercon 2023 Anthology, A Stranger Comes to Town: edited by Michael Koryta, Secrets in the Water, After Midnight: Tales from the Graveyard Shift, River River Journal, Snowbound: Best New England Crime Stories 2017, and 1+30: THE BEST OF MYSTORY.

When not writing, Emilya works as a visual artist and reads massive quantities of psychological thrillers, suspense, and crime fiction. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.

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