Superstructure and the Front Lines of Hollywood

The key elements that sell a story

When Hollywood producer and director Lane Shefter Bishop decided to start her own company, Vast Entertainment, she had a problem.

She knew she wanted to focus exclusively on book-to-screen adaptations because, in a sense, the slush pile had already been vetted. If she was reading original screenplays, maybe 1% would be good (this rate tracks pretty closely with my own experience reading submissions to literary journals and magazines).

But if she was reading books, more like 25-50% of them “could provide a nice base for a film or television project.” By the time a manuscript has literary representation or is coming out as a book, literary agents and editors have already done a lot of hard vetting work, as well as helping to develop the project into the best version of itself.

However, as she describes in the introduction to her 2016 book Sell Your Story in a Single Sentence: Advice from the Front Lines of Hollywood, Bishop was “in for a rude awakening”:

At the time, I found that no one wanted to hear about what they considered “lengthy material.” The page count didn’t even matter: Books as a whole just seemed too daunting. It was all the buying executives could do to focus on shorter, more concise screenplays; they certainly didn’t have extensive free time to read multiple novels. You’d practically hear a groan when you mentioned that the project was based on a book, and you just knew they were going to make some poor 19-year-old intern read it instead and deliver a short write-up on the plot. I vividly remember one executive literally starting to rearrange items on his desk instead of even pretending to listen, once I mentioned my pitch was based on a book.

Bishop knew she needed to focus on what made a literary property unique and how she could make that very clear, very fast, with the most dramatic punch she could muster.

Through what she describes as “a great deal of struggle as well as a ridiculous amount of trial and error,” she discovered the elements of what she terms a true logline, which should by now sound very familiar to anyone who has been reading Lit in One Sentence for a minute:

• Who is the protagonist?

• What do they want?

• What is at stake?

This is no accident. Bishop and her concept of a logline are one of the most important intellectual forebears of what I call a story’s emotional superstructure.

While I can bring the emotional neuroscience that explains why this works — we mirror both other beings and fictional characters via our mirror neuron system, and knowing what a character wants and what it could cost them allows us to model the emotional impact that any events in the story will have on them — I consider this the theoretical basis for the idea of superstructure.

The experimental evidence for how well it works comes from Bishop’s experiences on the front lines of Hollywood. Once she had nailed the concept of a logline, she “began to sell, setting up more than twenty projects in the first two years through a steady stream of pitches and meetings.”

Even when the audience is an entertainment executive with the attention span of a gnat, one well-crafted logline or superstructure sentence can land in their brains and open them up to the dominant emotional promise that any story has to offer. Like a free sample of a baked good, the major emotional tasting notes are all well-baked into that little bite.

Which is important because, as Bishop says:

Truly, the most important commodity in the film industry, as with most industries, is time — because no one has any. […] So the only way to get people excited about a property, whether a book or script, idea or invention, is to grab their attention and grab it quickly. Because no matter how busy people are, they always have time to hear one sentence. In all honesty, this lesson became the most valuable one I’ve learned in my numerous years in the entertainment business.

I knew I would be focusing on one-sentence encapsulations of character, journey, and stakes much more as a craft tool than as a pitch tool in this Substack — and that I would be looking at a broad range of narrative formats including novels, short stories, flash, stage plays, memoirs, etc in addition to movies and TV shows — which is why I never particularly wanted to use the word “logline” (an industry-standard term in the screen world, whether or not everyone else crafts them the same way Bishop does) and had to come up with something more broadly applicable like “emotional superstructure.”

But the point about time and attention is itself much more broadly applicable, because few of us ever have enough time to do all the things we might want to. Your readers, any publishing professionals you might work with, you yourself as a story creator sitting down to create — are any of us all that different from a Hollywood executive with the attention span of a gnat? Why keep our head in a story when we could start rearranging the objects on our desk or checking social media for fun updates at any time instead?

The good news is that loglines and superstructure sentences show that it is perfectly possible, if not always easy, to bake character, journey, and stakes into a single sentence. And stories are ultimately made up of, well, lots and lots of sentences. And groups of sentences that we call paragraphs or scenes or sections or chapters or acts or whatever. Each of these are in a sense their own little pitch to grab and hold your readers’ — or your own, as you are creating them — attention, while endless potential distractions are competing for that same attention.

And the elements of a good logline or superstructure sentence — who is the protagonist, what do they want, what is at stake — can work just as well to continually deliver on the emotional promise of a story in these smaller units as they do in a logline.

This is one of my rationales for using superstructure as a way to explore any other element of story craft, which is much of what we do on this Substack.

But today, I also want to pay homage to superstructure’s roots and potential as a highly effective entertainment industry pitch tool.

Because a strong superstructure sentence is also a strong base from which to craft any other pitch documents or materials you may need for a story.

Bishop advises attendees at writing conferences to include loglines at the top of their query letters to literary agents, for book-length projects. For submissions to literary journals and magazines, a logline or superstructure sentence could easily fit in a short cover letter. While there’s no guarantee anyone will read your letter before your pages (I almost always read pages first), if they do, they will enter your story with increased perceptual fluency and a lower risk of confusion as they figure out what’s happening on the first pages.

One-paragraph or one-page summaries or four-page synopses or back cover copy, or any other pitch materials meant to sell your story in a limited amount of space, can also be crafted as expansions of your story’s superstructure sentence. As long as you have a working superstructure that you like and are excited about, you’re never really facing a blank page when drafting any of these other documents. You always have this succinct encapsulation of your story’s dominant emotional promise to refer back to.

And then all of your creations — stories and pitch documents alike — will be suffused with the key combination of elements that sell best on the front lines of Hollywood.

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