by Larry Brooks
The premise should align with the tropes and expectations of its genre. While a genre story can be character driven, it must have a conceptual context that aligns with the genre, forcing the hero to take action against an external antagonistic force rather than simply existing as a situation within the story world while we watch the hero observing and responding to what is going on around him.
The premise should give us something new and fresh. Even if the genre defines familiar territory, give readers an original take on it. The highest goal of premise is to seduce, to make people want to read the story. In that sense, premise leverages the underlying power of concept to become bigger and better than before.
If you sense an overlap between the criteria for concept and premise, you are correct. But it is necessary to understand how they are the same in terms of objectives, and how they are different in terms of specific elements and essences.
Premise: Good, Better, Best
Any premise is better than no premise (which happens, especially in slice-of-life stories that lack a true dramatic plot or an antagonistic element), but, as with a concept, simply having one may not be enough. It is a matter of degree. Some premises are stronger than others even when they share a concept. The difference is the strength of the drama a premise promises, as opposed to just the intrigue of a static situation.
A story about two guys robbing a bank has strong possibilities. But it’s a lousy pitch if left to a simple logline, even if the writer has more in mind than this simplistic setup states. A story about identical twins robbing a bank owned by their father is a better story. But the best story would be about identical twins robbing their father’s bank because someone has kidnapped one of their children, and the only means of coming up with the ransom is to convince their father to give them the bank’s money, even though he is facing an IRS audit and a past-due Mafia loan. This is the best premise of the three because it is more detailed; the dramatic tension, conflict, and stakes are clearer and play at a higher level; and it is working with a deeper concept.
Never bet your premise on an implication that more is going on than what has been stated. A love story about two people in a small town has potential, but if that’s all there is—two people in love wandering around a small town—it’s a poor premise. A love story about two people of different races in a small Southern town in 1965 is a better premise. An even better premise, though, might be a love story with even more going on: The lovers leverage a dirty little secret about the mayor to force him to call off the lynch mob that promises to disrupt their wedding. The FBI intervenes using a trumped-up charge at the behest of the mayor, whom the governor helped get elected because of their shared racial bias. Now we have a more layered story with deeper thematic chops and more urgent stakes.
Notice in these examples how the premise moves from good to better to best by adding two realms of story physics:
a higher level of conflict
a deeper empathy for the characters
Both are choices made by the author, available at any time during the story development process, including the revision stage. The more story physics you pack into your premise pitch, the better it will work, not only as a pitch but also as the basis for story development. Because the higher purpose of a premise is, in fact, to ground the story in the author’s mind in a way that keeps the narrative on track rather than allowing the plot to ramble and drift.
The Big Mistakes with Premise
Stories are often rejected at the premise stage, even before a single word has been read. Why? Because they lack a clear promise of drama, conflict, stakes, and emotional resonance. An agent, editor, or prospective reader needs to sense that those elements will exist, so it behooves writers to make them as obvious as possible within the premise.
Slice-of-life stories that primarily ask us to observe a character moving through a specific circumstance or story world, without a real quest and stakes that inspire empathy, and that depend on backstory and characterization rather than drama, immediately raise a red flag. Story is conflict, and if this conflict doesn’t scream from the premise itself, it will be difficult to convince agents and editors that it will work at all. The real deal killer here is a writer who tries to create a literary story within the realm of genre fiction, which is like asking an audience to be interested in Hulk Hogan’s high school transcripts instead of rooting for him to throw Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson into the cheap seats.
Another potentially poor, frequently off-point premise is the telling of the life story of a fictional character. Stories that encompass a famous person’s entire life (or most of it) work because we’re already interested—the protagonist is the concept in that case—but that same interest doesn’t extend to a fictional hero. Your hero needs a specific problem to solve and/or an opportunity to go for. She needs to encounter specific obstacles that stem from external sources. Something needs to be at stake, and the story should follow a singular plot arc rather than a series of vignettes or anecdotal episodes. If your pitch includes the words “the adventures of,” which is as episodic as it gets, the odds of acceptance and success go down considerably.
Episodic is a bad word when pitching a premise, and toxic when it is an intentional goal of story planning. Two people who travel to Southeast Asia and have adventures is a weak premise. There isn’t a plot, and other than a few microdramas, no dramatic tension is involved. We may like these characters, but the story doesn’t give us much to root for. It’s a diary, and a diary is not a novel an agent or editor will want to see.
Some writers push back on this, citing books like Eat, Pray, Love. Sure, it was a bestseller and a hit movie, and it didn’t have a plot. It was, by intention, episodic as hell. But Eat, Pray, Love is not a novel. It’s a memoir. If you’re writing fiction, you need a plot—no exceptions. Even stating your intention to make your story “character driven” will send agents and editors scurrying into a dark corner of the writing conference in hopes of avoiding you altogether. The only avenue for a plotless, episodic, character-driven, slice-of-life novel, no matter how beautifully written, is in the literary genre, which is among the most difficult genres to crack. If your story comes anywhere near this description, you may have just found your explanation for rejection and a game plan for revision.
Even if your story is literary, an agent will ask you to provide more than your protagonist’s backstory and angst. You’ll need to tell an in-the-moment story, one that showcases all the character facets you hold near and dear and positions them as catalysts, obstacles, and complications with an external hero’s quest. In other words, a premise.
If you are writing fiction, your story needs a plot. It needs a dramatic premise. The more original and compelling, the better.
Examples of Premise
Let’s look at a couple of bestsellers to showcase their concepts and the premises that flow from them, each culled and described separately.
Nelson DeMille’s bestseller Wild Fire has a killer concept: High-ranking patriotic political zealots perpetrate a heinous act of terrorism on their own country (the United States), rationalizing the loss of lives as the cost of a noble goal. They then seek to place the blame on Middle East extremists in order to motivate a massive military response that will take out the real terrorists once and for all (in other words, make the president angry enough to strike back). Because of the buttons this concept pushes (which I call narrative strategy, one of the six realms of story physics), we are already on board. In fact, we're rooting for a hero to stop these psychopaths before more American lives are lost.
All of that is the concept.
The premise is the story of a former military intelligence officer who is sent in to solve a crime that is later revealed to be connected to this plot. He must overcome a cover-up among high-level players who are in on the scheme before he can expose their diabolical plan and bring them down. All of this plays out while a time bomb that would most certainly incite the next world war ticks in the b
ackground. That’s a massively dramatic premise with huge stakes that readers will engage with on an emotional level and that may even inspire sympathy for the patriotic villains, as well as the protagonist.
In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the concept is that a wife could, if so moved, disappear and fabricate incriminating evidence that makes her death appear to be a murder committed by her husband. This is a juicy concept that taps into the heart of the emotional fragility of marriage and the desperate means that someone sufficiently resentful and hopeless might resort to for revenge.
The premise shows us this entire process with the introduction of the wife and husband in context to the history of their relationship, which has become cold and toxic. The appeal is twofold: First, we are privy to the moment when Amy, the “missing” wife, confesses her machinations, which will cause her husband to be indicted for murder. Second, we watch as the two players outsmart each other with Machiavellian tactics, each move unfolding with the seriousness of a chess match. This causes the wife to make even more diabolical plans behind the scenes, completely and totally humiliating and subordinating her husband with threats he cannot comprehend. Both players win and get what they want in a compromised form (the husband gets to be with his child, and the wife gets the husband), but they must sink to new lows of deception, extortion, and sacrifice to maintain a level of fraudulent compatibility.
The result is brilliantly told, and the author amply rewarded: Gone Girl was a runaway bestseller and an Oscar-nominated film. At the heart of that success was the concept itself—it fueled the premise with can’t-look-away darkness that delivered a wickedly delightful and vicarious experience for the reader/viewer.
Certainly Flynn didn’t settle for the first story idea—concept or premise—that came to mind. She set her bar high and demanded an extraordinarily powerful set of story physics from both.
That opportunity also awaits you, as you seek ways to fix, elevate, and resurrect your novel prior to reintroducing it to the marketplace.
Revise Your Premise
Using these proven criteria for effective premise, juxtaposed with the grade you assigned yourself for the premise you wrote down, and in context to your newly empowered understanding of the relationship between concept and premise, take another swing at it. Give your premise even more punch with a highly visible potential for dramatic tension and reader empathy. Using one or two sentences, make us want to read this story.
Do any of your grades improve with this new, stronger premise? They just might, if your prior awareness and feel for the power of premise was lacking, even a little.
The Complication of Premise
Here’s the challenge about premise: What may appeal to you may not resonate with agents, editors, or readers. Just as with concept, only your story sensibility determines how close you come to commercial viability. This cuts to the core of whether a story will soar or remain a niche tale that appeals to only a small reader demographic.
This is art, too. You get to choose. Are you writing what you want, or are you writing to build your career as an author, which requires you to be strategic and clever in your story choice? Choose carefully, and then adjust your dreams accordingly. They don’t call most writers starving artists for nothing. And regardless of your choice, the craft side of the proposition remains the same: There are tools that can help you achieve what you seek to attain. Only the choice of scope and the proportions of your concept, along with the premise that flows from it, determine the difference between big and small, between art and commercial appeal, in this regard.
Writing for yourself, to heal or speak your truth, is a noble endeavor. But it may not get you the success you hope for. Writing for others, for commercial gain only, can be an equally dark path, leaving your story without emotion or artistic merit. The best strategy of all is to do both. This is why you should choose your stories carefully, because that window of opportunity limits your candidates significantly. Write a story worth writing, and worth reading. That’s the key to an ultimate storytelling experience.
Ask yourself if your premise appeals to a wide and inherently commercial readership. Or does it focus too narrowly on a specific corner of life, even if that issue is important to you? While it’s not impossible for stellar execution to elevate an unlikely story to greatness, the odds are forever in the favor of stories that deliver precisely what the genre promises its readers. In either case, concept and premise are like a marquee, giving readers some indication that they will find compatible tastes and fascinations inside.
Don’t make a genre story overly driven by or dependent on your characters. Don’t assume readers care about your characters before you give them a reason to care. Don’t force absurdity into your premise for the sake of originality. Don’t bend the rules of reason or the odds of coincidence to make your premise work. We place our bets when we make choices about these elements.
A story crossed my desk recently in which the President of the United States, in conjunction with a whacked-out military zealot, sets out to destroy entire American cities to illustrate our country’s inability to deal with tragedy, and pins the attacks on foreign terrorists. Definitely conceptual, and yet so far out there that hardly anyone would give the story serious consideration. The author’s story sensibility was the problem, despite having a narrative arc that actually executed the idea rather well. The author believed this was an A-grade concept and premise; my feedback was that agents and editors would not agree. After reflection, which included a thorough review of the concept and premise for his story, the author ultimately dropped the project entirely, saving perhaps a year of his writing life and allowing him to start his next project with a more informed sense of the craft.
The whole thing, therefore, ended up being a win rather than a rejection. There is always something to learn from these experiences.
Write what you please, but know that readers are reading what they please as well.
A Second Pass at Grading Your Story
In these last two chapters, you have discovered and explored the nature and inherent power of concept and premise. In doing so, your writing world—and indeed, your story—may already look quite different. Now it’s time to revisit your story’s raw grist and see how your heightened awareness of the role of concept and premise has changed how you grade it. If your concept wasn’t solid the first time, and if your premise failed to meet the criteria for a robust story, this round may be a wakeup call of epic proportions across all twelve variables of the core competencies and their story physics. Using the definitions and criteria provided thus far, return to those twelve story elements and grade your execution in particular, and your understanding in general, once again.
You may, in this very process, discover what is holding your story back.
Story Element or EssenceGrade (A–F)
1. Concept (the presence of something conceptual)
2. Dramatic premise/arc (hero’s quest, goal)
3. Dramatic tension (conflict via antagonistic element)
4. Vicarious reader experience
5. Compelling characterization
6. Reader empathy (what the reader roots for)
7. Thematic weight, relevance, and resonance
8. Effective story architecture (structure)
9. Optimal pacing
10. Scene execution
11. Writing voice
12. Narrative strategy
The Value of Your Self-Assessment
The collision of old awareness with a new and enlightened consciousness will define the future of your story. Because if you refuse to change a story you believe is an A on all counts but is really a C (or worse) based on the criteria, then your revision will fall short. The entire point here is discovery and change … fixing, upgrading, strengthening. There’s nowhere to go but up. If you believed you were already on top of the mountain—and thus that those who rejected you were just plain wrong—you may have realized that you’re the one who was wrong after a
ll.
This realization is cause for celebration, because, as is the case in any sort of rehabilitation effort, you can’t begin the growth process until you acknowledge the problems. Now you are about to learn what is required to make your story better.
Chapter 6
The Key to Everything
The human body has a brain. All bodily functions, every last one of them, are controlled by this organ. The brain directs not only the functions of the body but also the presentation of the person to the world—his appearance, his choices, his talents and shortcomings, his worldview, his ability to love, his propensity for darkness, his moral compass. His entire being stems from whatever is going on within his brain, as formed by his experiences, surroundings, and exterior influences.
Your story has a brain, too. It is the determinant of everything that happens and is perceived within the story. That organ, if you will, is your premise, which we discussed at length in the previous chapter. And as a brain benefits from a good upbringing and an education, your premise benefits greatly when a strong conceptual context resides at its core.
Your premise, influenced by the power of your concept, completely controls the story: contextually, materially, sequentially, cosmetically, thematically, dramatically. But notice that it is not the full story, which requires a plethora of events and catalysts to create a cohesive flow. Rather, the premise hits the high marks, and the story is left to the manuscript. Premise is a planning and a pitching tool, defining your intentions for the story and the promise you are making to readers. Further details are the stuff of outlines, or exploratory drafts, both of which are extensions of the premise itself.