A writer’s group that I belong to did an activity regarding premise. Each member posted the premise of their current WIP. It was no easy task for most of us. Our group leader cited a number of writers and gave us a detailed explanation of premise. Alas, I either had a blonde moment – or a senior one. Several of them. Strung together. For the life of me, I couldn’t get the concept of premise.

So I drudged up my trusty dictionary and various books on the writing craft, looking for something to help me “get it.” Here’s what I came up with.

Theme and premise, while closely related, are not the same. Let’s look at definitions from The American Heritage Dictionary:

Theme: an implicit or recurrent idea

Premise:  a propositiion on which an argument is based or from which a conclusion is drawn.

In fiction, theme is generally defined as a universal concept that readers identify with. In No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript That Sells, author and former literary agenty Alice Orr provides a generic list of some dramatic themes:

• Betrayal
• Deceit
• Guilt
• Loss
• Obsession
• Revenge
• Envy
• Sacrifice
• Greed
• Privation
• Cruelty
• Duty
• Heroism
• Disgrace
• Love
• Cowardice
• Hatred
• Redemption

Author  and literary agent Donald Maass says novels are moral, and reader gravitate to novels that validate their values. He says that within the broad dramatic themes lie some explames of moral universal themes:

• Crime doesn’t pay
• Love conquers all
• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
• Two wrongs don’t make a right
• Change is inevitable
• Hope springs eternal
• Money is the root of all evil

Orr cautions that approaching your story “from the head” makes it difficult to find the emotional truth. She says theme should emerge from story. So if you don’t have an identifiable theme when you start your novel, don’t worry about it. It’s okay to have only the idea that you want to write a “revenge” story or a “love” story when you first begin thinking about your novel.

Premise, on the other hand, is an argument – a specific point of view – that the writer sets out to “prove.” In the novel, the writer determines a “truth” and sets out to convince the reader using various devices, including setting and actions/attitudes of the characters. Premise isn’t necessarily moral, but it is created from the writer’s passion, something the writer feels needs to be said about something.

For instance, let’s say the universal theme is “love conquers all.”  The writer might put forth the argument that “premarital sex leads to divorce.” The premise in this case appears to challenge the validity of the theme. Which can make for some very interesting conflicts for the characters.

Premise arises out of your story idea. It is a product of “what-iffing.” In Writing the Breakout Novel, Maass lists the key components of a “breakout” premise:

1. Plausibility.
2. Inherent conflict.
3. Originality.
4. Gut emotional appeal.

Author James N. Frey explains premise this way in How to Write A Damn Good Novel: “The premise of a story is simply a statement of what happens to the characters as a result of the core conflict of the story.”

So let’s say you’re writing a science fiction novel with the broad theme of “duty.” And in the course of “what-iffing” you decide that your story will be about an astronaut who is extraordinarily devoted to his job. But you want a twist to creat conflict. Your story premise might be: “Going into space leads to annihilation by aliens.” The astronaut determined to do his duty – consequences and conflicts arising from that determination put into action – resulting in the ultimate disaster for both the individual and the planet. That might not be a “breakout” premise, but you get the idea.

Think of premise as a one-line summary of precisely what you, the writer, are saying in your novel.

Doing or believing X leads to Y

No explanations of the who or why; save the details for your novel.  

You know that saying “You can’t see the forest for the trees”? It applies to writing. Sometimes (well, in my case, maybe a lot of times)we writers think we know how to do something and it turns out that we just thought we knew what we were doing. LOL

Case in point: I rewrote a scene from one of my WIPs and cut it down considerably. It was the Heroine/Hero’s first meeting so I bobbed and weaved from her POV to his and back again. Hey, that’s supposed to be a romance genre technique, right? I successfully stayed in each character’s POV, but with my tunnel vision I missed the big picture until it was pointed out by another writer.

My scene had a “ping-pong match” feel to it because I wasn’t staying in one character’s POV long enough. A paragraph for her, two for him, three for her, another one for him. I wasn’t letting the poor reader have enough time with either character to get to know him/her. Which will translate to the reader not being able to bond, identify with, and care about those characters. My bad.

The lesson in this is to periodically step outside your own view of your work and welcome feedback from other writers.

I tend to write with an eye toward an underlying theme of redemption. I don’t deliberately set out to do that; it just seems to develop that way when I begin creating my characters. Somehow each character’s “wound” requires some form of redemption.  Heaven help me not to analyze it! Any time I start analyzing what I’m writing or why I’m writing it…well, let’s just say that the work is soon abandoned. I never hear “why are you doing that?” as anything other than a demand for explanation and justification. LOL

For a helpful article on theme and premise, check out Vicki Hinze’s writers library. That woman is amazing!

I can’t believe how much time I’ve spent writing backstory, all the while thinking I was writing my novel.  Ya’ll know what backstory is: all those fascinating details about what happened to your characters before the story starts, how they got to be who they are and where they are at the time of the story’s opening.  Yes, yes, that is all very important information that you, the writer, needs to know. 

However, the reader doesn’t give a hunting dog’s left rear paw about it. The reader wants the story to start in the here and now.  Don’t tell me about the Hero’s tragic childhood, moans Reader, show me the kind of trouble he’s in right now.  Don’t bore the reader with details of the long train ride to Where It Happens; set her down right smack in the middle of T-R-O-U-B-L-E.  As you flesh out the story, subtly add information that will help the reader understand the character’s fears and motivations. 

Don’t stop writing backstory for your characters. The writer needs to know far more about the characters than the reader does. Just be aware that backstory is not story. Story is what is happening to the characters in the here and now of your novel.