Welcome to a short guide for designing a story’s premise.
According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a premise is the primary plot or storyline of a literary work, television show, etc.
There will be a checklist at the bottom that you can copy/paste for ease of use.
Real Talk
The “premise” is the basic idea of what your story IS.
It’s the heart of your fiction, deciding on themes, greater themes, characters, and style. It informs you as the author for what you’re supposed to be targeting in your writing. Skipping the design phase…well. It can cause you problems as time goes.
Step One: Research
“Has this been done before?”
That’s a question a lot of authors ask themselves when first designing a story (premise). The answer is 99.9999999% of the time, yes. But maybe not with your styling. Maybe, not with your vocabulary, or know-how, or a million other things.
It’s safe to just assume that it’s been done before, so you need to find a new way to present the material. Thus, we have research.
I speak to new authors all the time about looking at the ‘meta’ or market analysis of their story. Most come back at me with the Straight-Jane answer of “I’m gonna write what I want to read.”
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, why would you write a story you wouldn’t want to read? But I think there’s something they’re misunderstanding. Market analysis isn’t there to tell you what you can’t write; it’s there to tell you what’s selling.
In LitRPG a few years ago, VRMMO’s went the way of the dinosaur. There were too many, and the reason most of them died was that there were no stakes to the protagonist dying within the story. It’s hard for readers to care if a digital NPC goes away or if the protagonist doesn’t get that huge ungodly axe of axes. There’s little impact. Then came along Kyle Kirrin’s The Ripple System.
It had flash, pizzazz, great humor, and some pretty interesting twists on what is commonly found within the VRMMO subgenre, also called Tropes.
Trope: A frequently recurring element, theme, character type, or plot pattern in creative works.
Brandon Sanderson has famously spoken of the familiar and the strange. You want your story to have some things in common with others for your subgenre, so the reader has a clear expectation of how things work. However, you need enough strangeness to set it apart and make it unique.
The Ripple System did this. So, it went the way of the chicken, evolving from the dinosaur (maybe; I don’t really know if that’s true).
Research Amazon to see what’s selling and what the reviews say so you can target your audience a little.
Research web serial locations, like Royal Road and Wattpad, to see the current top hits and what is rising fast.
If you know for a fact that there’s a ton of Magical Girl stories coming out, why would you try to release yours at the same time? If you’ve already written it, put it on the back burner and pull it off the shelf later. Nobody is saying you can’t write that story, and maybe it’ll be great, but timing is a big deal if you want people to read it among the millions of others out there. It’s not easy to move to the front.
To wrap up:
Research what’s selling.
Research tropes within your genre and sub-genre.
Research the audience you’re intending to reach.
That’s step one.
Step Two: The Idea
This is where things get a little more complicated.
Ideas are great; everyone has them. Also, Ideas are common; everyone has them. So what makes your idea special?
Did you twist the trope? The protagonist? What’s your theme going to be?
Many people, particularly those not recently in school, don’t know what a theme is. As such, I’ve defined it below.
Theme: The central idea, underlying message, or deeper meaning in a story.
Themes are amazing. They’re the heart of your story, and if you’re still confused about what that means, I’m including two examples here.
Dungeon Crawler Carl: The story constantly asks the reader, what is life worth, and can tragedy cause you to lose your humanity?
Standard LitRPG: LitRPG often carries the theme of Meritocracy. The harder you work, the more you’re rewarded, no matter how you began in life.
Themes are the bedrock. If you don’t have one, it can cause problems for you when your character or plot runs into a roadblock. If your choices as an author aren’t consistent, people stop reading the story. Then, you have the protagonist, and what I call the greater theme.
A.V.A.’s Greater Theme: The defining idea behind your protagonist’s personality.
For Symphony, my first series, my protagonist lives by the ideal that he can be a better version of himself each day.
For QuestWright, my second series, my protagonist is trying to be that lone candle of hope, burning in a darkness of despair.
From the bottom up, their choices throughout the stories and how they manage conflict have relied on their greater themes. Both stories have other themes, like redemption, agency, and found family, a common trope in stories nowadays. But the greater theme is for them, only. It defines their personalities and allows me to never question what they might go with in any particular choice.
Step Three: The Engine
Before I can dive into plot, true characterization, and worldbuilding, I have to invent an engine.
The engine is how you discover conflict, how the story progresses, and how escalation naturally occurs. Without those three things, your pacing will be off from the start.
What is the primary conflict of the story? How can that conflict be used to create a perpetual motion machine for drama and growth? What are the stakes, and why would they matter for the reader?
Loops are useful for this. They’re designed so that when one problem is solved, another arrives. Dakota Krout’s Ritualist series naturally did this by sending the protagonist to a new world every time he reached a certain height of power. Thus, they’re back at the bottom, working their way up again. Conflict, escalation, and progress, wrapped up in a neat bow.
The 3-act arc is what most plotters use to find their engine. It’s broken down like this:
Act 1: Ignition: Protagonist makes a choice that they cannot take back. Conflict and stakes are discovered.
Act 2: A problem gets solved, but it’s not enough. Failure is present. The problem becomes larger than expected; the scope of the story expands.
Act 3: The problem is impossible. The protagonist reaches a breaking point. Solves the problem using an unexpected method.Consequences arrive.
For pantsters, or plantsers like myself (I plan the end, but discover the story on the way there), the three-act arc is possible, but a little difficult to reach. I find forcing a perpetual motion machine to be much more valuable.
Last Step: Validation
Now that you have all of this researched, designed, and thought out. Try to break it.
Attempt to imagine the story in ten different scenarios. Go through them, one at a time, and see if your plans work. More importantly, see if you want to write a story like this. If not? Change it till it fits, or throw it in the bin and start again.
Once you’ve tested it on yourself, test it on others. Throw it at friends, family, or even fellow writers. See if they have problems. I guarantee that as you stress-test your premise, they’ll come up with ideas that will either help you fix flaws you didn’t see coming or add to your story in unique ways you hadn’t considered.
And that’s it.
The very last thing I have in this article is a quick checklist for each time you’re trying to develop a premise for your writing. I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts and that it helps you in your future endeavors as a writer.
Premise Design Checklist
- Research the genre, subgenre, and similar stories.
- Identify common tropes, expectations, and overused ideas.
- Decide what makes your idea different.
- Identify the story’s main theme.
- Define your protagonist’s Greater Theme.
- Make sure that Greater Theme can guide their major choices.
- Identify the story’s primary conflict.
- Define the stakes.
- Build a story engine that naturally creates new problems.
- Make sure success and failure both lead to further conflict.
- Check that progression naturally creates escalation.
- Imagine the premise in ten different scenarios.
- Ask whether the premise still works in each one.
- Ask whether you would actually enjoy writing those scenarios.
- Change or discard anything that stops being interesting.
- Pitch the premise to friends, family, or fellow writers.
- Pay attention to questions, loopholes, and assumptions they notice.
- Use their feedback to strengthen the premise.
- Stress-test it again until the idea feels durable enough to build a story on.
Be First to Comment