Finding the Core of Your Story is available on Amazon in both Kindle and print editions.
What’s your story about?
It’s the most frightening question in the world if all you have is a blank stare. But what if you had an attention-grabbing answer that left your audience wanting more? It’s not only possible, it’s simple if you have the right tools.
What people are saying:
“Finding the Core of Your Story should be required reading for all who have written books and want them noticed.”
— LA Ramsey, author and novelist
“As a screenwriter and self-published author, I’ve always sought Jordan Smith’s help with my loglines. Having read this book I can testify it contains all his best advice and provides a lighthearted but thorough crash course to loglines. If more writers would heed the advice on these pages, they would avoid the inept pitches and synopses so common among self-published authors. Highly recommended as an essential read for any writer.”
— Aubrey Hansen, author of Red Rain and Peter’s Angel
“Not only was the book extremely helpful and well-laid out, but it was incredibly fun to read! The author is personable and down-to-earth and had me laughing several times. With this book, you are just a short, enjoyable read away from creating your own masterful logline.”
— J. Grace Pennington, author of Firmament: Radialloy and Never
Story consultant Jordan Smith has helped countless storytellers strengthen and pitch their stories. His tool of choice is the logline, a technique for selling screenplays that is little known outside of Hollywood. Jordan has adapted this powerful tool and made it accessible to all storytellers.
Not only is a logline useful for answering that frightening question, it’s also handy for keeping your story on track. If you don’t know the core of your story, you run the risk of meandering it into places where it doesn’t belong. With these techniques, you can solve story problems early before they cause you trouble.
Inside this award-winning book, you’ll find:
- The Quick-Start Logline Chapter to get you going right away
- Exercises to build your logline skills one step at a time
- The four fundamental logline rules
- Useful chapters to dig deeper and handle special cases
- More examples than you can shake a stick at
- And more!
Whether you write novels, movies, comic books, songs, or even operas, this book is for you. Every storyteller should be able to say in one sentence what his story is about. Finding the Core of Your Story will help you learn to do just that.
What’s new in the revised and expanded edition
This revised and expanded edition features four brand new chapters, where you’ll learn to use the Handy-Dandy Three-Sentence Trick when you get stuck, apply logline concepts to an entire series, discover how to bring out your unique non-story hook, and find out why you might want to write a logline for each of your characters.
The new edition also includes an expanded chapter on crafting your pitch, a new introduction, and all-around tweaks to make this the best edition of Finding the Core of Your Story yet.