Today's Discussion on Loglines made it painfully clear your Main Character needs this:

David Stem

4d • General discussion

Today’s discussion on loglines made something very clear:

Your main character must desperately need something before the plot starts.

Not after the inciting incident.

Not once the story “gets going.”

From frame one.

Too many scripts introduce a protagonist who is basically a blank slate — a person the plot happens to. They may have backstory, but it isn’t active yet. It hasn’t hardened into behavior, attitude, or pressure.

Holy shit scripts don’t do this.

They introduce characters who are already mid-struggle with life when we meet them.

Tony Soprano

We don’t meet a powerful mob boss at the top of his game — we meet a man already cracking. Panic attacks. Therapy. Suffocating under family, masculinity, and leadership.

The plot doesn’t create his crisis. It exposes the one he’s been barely holding together for years.

Neo (The Matrix)

Neo isn’t “chosen” because he’s empty — he’s chosen because he’s already searching. When we meet him, he’s exhausted, sleepless, and obsessed with the feeling that reality is wrong. He’s been hunting Morpheus for years.

The inciting incident doesn’t awaken him — it answers a question he’s been bleeding from.

Walter White

Before cancer. Before meth.

He’s hiding it under the surface as an upbeat math teach, but in truth, he's already humiliated, resentful, and furious about wasted potential. A man who believes the world robbed him.

The plot doesn’t install the wound — it removes the leash.

Here’s the takeaway:

Great loglines don’t start with what happens.

They start with who this person already is — and what they cannot keep living without.

If your logline could apply to a dozen different protagonists, the issue probably isn’t structure.

It’s that your character doesn’t arrive hungry enough.

Your turn:

• What other characters come to mind that fit this pattern?

• How does this apply to the protagonist in the script you’re writing right now?

• What does your main character desperately need before page one?

Let’s hear it.

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