Title & Logline
Craft guidance for naming the story and pitching it in one sentence.
Title Craft
- Comps: A working title should sit comfortably beside comparable titles in the genre — same weight, same register. If every comp is a single evocative noun and yours is a full clause, it signals the wrong shelf.
- Hook phrasing: The best titles carry a small hook — a contradiction, an image, a question the premise raises. One unexpected word beats a paragraph of description.
- Title as promise: The title is a contract with the reader about tone and subject. A grim title on a light romance (or the reverse) breaks the promise before page one. Check the title against the
premise:instory.md: do they promise the same story?
Test the title out loud, in a search box (is it taken?), and against the chapter-one content. Rename freely during planning; rename reluctantly after chapter five.
Logline Recipe
One sentence: protagonist + want + obstacle + stakes.
{Name}, a {protagonist description}, wants {goal} but {obstacle} — and if they fail, {stakes}.
- Protagonist: a vivid fragment, not a resume. "A disgraced cartographer" beats "John, 34, from Ohio."
- Want: the external goal — what they are chasing across the whole story.
- Obstacle: the force opposing them (person, system, or circumstance), concrete enough to picture.
- Stakes: what is lost if they fail — specific and personal, not "the world" unless the world is genuinely at stake.
The logline is a planning tool, not marketing copy. When the draft drifts, compare it to the logline: either the drift is the story finding itself (update the logline), or the story lost its thread (steer back).