Thanks for giving me the clarity I was looking for. Have a wonderful day!

I recommend both if it is a connected series. One for the overall goal, then one for each individual story (sub-storyline).

I like the way you narrow the idea of a log line down. I didn’t have a clear idea of what it was. So this was an interesting way of defining it. Anyone can kind of come close to what their story is about, but I liked the elements defined that one could apply to what their story was. Thanks.

Thanks for all the info. I underplayed my stakes a little because what you describe at the end there is pretty much what does happen (not a meth-head mom but similar choices going on) and there’s physical danger in the last act. The protag’s success or failure hangs on actions resulting from the “different opinion” so it’s not a passive thing.

Through the lens of a young teen, even one month of foster care seems like an eternity (given her age it’s going to be several years) so it’s not something she can wait out especially as she knows exactly where she wants to be, and where we can see she needs to be.

There’s more stuff going on than I’ve described but for a logline I need to discard the subplots (which give the main plot context). So, I guess the story is “about” her efforts to control what happens to her given her limited resources, and there’s a trust/betrayal theme running through it regarding various family members. There’s a ticking clock of sorts at the end – maybe I need to introduce it earlier.

No you aren’t off-topic. Here’s one.

For instance “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.”

When a young playwright humiliates her mother by casting her as a raging alcoholic villain in her hit play, thus demolishing the mother/daughter relationship, her mother’s friends (the women who helped rear her) part with a book (The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood) that details many painful events from her mother’s point of view, a book that holds the key to the forgiveness necessary to mend a shattered relationship.

In “Divine Secrets” Sidda never stopped to think her perspective might have been skewed because she was a child. She didn’t stop to wonder if her mother’s side of the story might be different. When she writes this play and slanders her mother (because she so thinly veiled her villain it was obvious to the world it was Vivi) she NEVER stops to think of the blowback her mother might endure. The shame, hurt, guilt and grief she would inflict on another human being. Even IF her mother had been a monster, Sidda never considered the punishment didn’t fit the crime and her mom didn’t deserve to be dragged though the mud. The book is a parallel timeline to give Siddah the WHOLE story and we see her evolve from immature victim to a more fully evolved and compassionate human being stripped of her holier-than-thou self-righteousness.

But I will point out that your story’s stakes aren’t interesting. The bigger the stakes the better and your concept had a lot of problems that stand out. First, there needs to be a clear MC (ONE). Even in “The Joy Luck Club” Amy Tan chose June to bookend the story and act as vanguard even though the Joy Luck Club (her mother’s friends who played mah jong together) are supporting cast members. June never got a chance to mend fences with her mother who’s died of cancer.

She hit below the belt when she threw the babies (twins) her mother left on the side of the road during war in her face during an argument. In Chinese culture they are very superstitious and her mother was fleeing the Japanese attacks and had dysentery and believed she was going to die. She left the babies with all her valuables hoping someone would get them to their father or at least save them. She knew no one would help the babies with a “ghost mother” attached and crawled away to die only to wake up in a Red Cross hospital. She’d been saved, but the babies were never located.

NOW, the friends have found the twins. The questions is whether June will end up on that boat to China to reunite with the half-sisters she’s never known, thus completing her mother’s dream and healing Junes deep shame, regret and guilt that she never got a chance to tell her mother she was sorry.

And most books don’t have the villains you are describing. The antagonist is contingent on what genre you’re reading so I recommend reading more books in your genre. Lianne Morairty “What Alice Forgot,” Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club”, Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help,” “Glengarry Glen Ross” by David Mamet, etc.

But back to your concept, it isn’t robust enough to be a story. If someone has an opinion I don’t like…who cares? People are allowed to have an opinion and no one promised us a life where we only heard stuff we agreed with. And she won’t be allowed to live where she wants? Um, ok. How does this play out if we put it on a movie screen. Authentic drama is external as well as internal. Otherwise it’s navel-gazing.

Your stakes are low and there is no time crunch to make the reader worry. Even in Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” the salesman has to land a sale by X time or he’s fired and he isn’t exactly a young guy. He will have no job and be humiliated. Sales is all he’s ever known and a man approaching his sixties is not going to be able to find another job easily and he won’t be able to provide for his family. EVERYTHING is on the line. His job, his future, his ability to live (pay rent, groceries, etc.).

Not getting to live where I want to? Okay. Tell me why we need to care, especially since if this is a teen then this MC is close to being of age and will have free agency to hang out/do/be where she wants. But if you have a foster kid who is in the system because her mother had a bad meth habit and was in and out of jail who NOW wants custody but lives on the opposite side of the country? Now we have a story problem. There are stakes. If Mom gets her she loses her friends (family) and a ticking clock (papers being filed and a court date) and a tough choice (is Mom actually clean or is this another time I will be abandoned?).

Hope this helps.