Philipe Le Miere:

I respectfully disagree.? You may have an interesting premise for a story, but I do not see a logical casual relationship between the defining characteristic of the main character, the inciting incident created by the antagonist and the plot problem.

First of all, I haven’t read about Aristotle’s Poetics; instead I’ve read? the Poetics.? Okay, several translations of the classic.? Murphy’s citation is from chapter 9 and I suggest the entire chapter needs to be read to understand the full meaning Aristotle discussion of necessary and probable causation in drama.? Context matters.

Second, in the standard statement of a logical syllogism:

All men are mortal (universal statement)
Socrates is? a man? (particular statement)
Therefore, Socrates is mortal (logical inference from the two)

For the logical inference to be valid? the 2nd statement must contain an element that is a member of a universal set in the 1st term.? In this case? man is an? element of the universal set of men, right?
Further the 3rd sentence and 1st sentence must share a common term.? In this case it is? mortal, the descriptive term to be logically deduced.

Whereas in your syllogism:

A straight vain sports star
is Outbid by psychopath on expensive painting
Therefore, he performs in a drag queen competition

There is no element in the 2nd sentence that is a member of a universal set in the 1st term.? In fact there is no shared word or term tetween the 2 sentences.
Furthermore, there is no common term that is logically deduced between the 1st and 3rd sentence.? Again, the 3rd and 1st sentence have no words, no terms in common. “Drag” in the 3rd sentence is not the same term and does not have the same meaning as “straight” in the 1st .? Rather the two are contrary terms.

Ergo, I stand by my original statement.? A bridge of necessary and sufficient terms and logic are missing.? I take loglines at face value, at what they literally say, not what I think the writer meant to say.? Words I can read; minds I can’t.

Shizz:

By “What’s the visual?” I mean two things:

1] An effective logline evokes scenes in the imagination of a? logline reader? as to what the conflict, the struggle will look like on a movie screen.? The imaginary scenes may be totally different than what the writer puts in the script. No matter; what matters is that the words stimulate the reader’s imagination.

To be frank the part of your logline that stimulates the imagination (for better or worse) is “radical terrorist academic that collected torture porn” — but that seems to be back story, not the central story.? In comparison, the central story “teach her children the merits of assertiveness skills and socialist feminism” — not so much.

2] As indicated earlier, an effective logline states a concrete objective goal.? A concrete objective goal is one that can be a visualized on the screen in a way that informs viewers that the protagonist has succeeded or failed. For example, if a runner’s objective goal is to win the gold in the Olympics than there are two obvious visual moments? that inform the audience she has succeeded:? she breaks the tape at the finish line and she gets the gold medal draped around her neck as she stands on the highest pedestal.

So, what’s the visual for “teach her children the merits of assertiveness skills and socialist feminism”.? What does the scene look like that visually informs the audience that she’s succeeded or failed?? (Or are assertiveness skills and socialist feminism means, rather than ends?)