Writing a story or novel: The Idea/Premise
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re writing—or want to write—a book, story, script, or something that involves putting made up things on paper via words that you scoop out of your brain. This article is meant to help with the first step: the idea, or the premise.
There’s this question that professional writer’s get asked a whole lot. I know I used to ask this question, and maybe you have too. The question is, “Where do you get your ideas?”
Well, if you’re ever lucky enough to meet one of those professional writers and you ask them this question, you’ll probably be a bit disappointed with their response.
See, writers don’t really know where their ideas come from, so they tend to give an answer that will satisfy the person asking them. “I keep an idea journal,” one might say. Or, “I get inspiration from music, dreams, other pieces of writing, etc…”
The truth is, the question itself is flawed. Writers don’t get ideas—they recognize them.
Everyone in the world is always thinking about things all the time. We imaginative types tend to daydream a lot. We stare at clouds and the stars, and we make up scenarios while we shower, and we lie awake at night imagining things that could never happen but wouldn’t it be awesome if they did.
What separates a writer’s thoughts from a normie’s thoughts is the net. The filter. The object in your mind that looks at all those random thoughts and ideas and says, “This is interesting, but there isn’t much to this idea.” “This one isn’t good at all.” or “This one is boring and I’ll forget about it by tonight.”
But then here comes one idea. It may not be a full idea. It might be a simple image.
I remember the fantasy novel I will be releasing in 2021 began with a single picture in my mind with a group of people sitting around a campfire in the dark woods, and in my mind they all looked exhausted and dirty. They were heading somewhere, or running from something, and I needed answers.
And that’s it. All of a sudden you’ll have an idea that will catch in the net, and it’ll take hold, and if you feed it and water it and give it some sun and caffeine, it’s sprout and blossom into a story. Writers don’t get ideas because they’re always having ideas, all the time. They’re just good at recognizing when one of those ideas is worth developing.
Now, I can’t see into you’re head and you can’t see into mine, so what we’re going to do is try to come up with something together and see if we can’t find an idea that’s worth developing.
If you don’t already have a story idea in mind, there are plenty of websites that offer free idea generators for stories. Here’s one. Go try it out and come back when you find one that you like.
Now that you have an interesting idea, let’s think about it a bit more. What we want is to be able to write a sentence describing your story. This is called the premise. This is what you’ll tell people when you say “Hey, I’m writing a book” and they say “Oh yeah? What’s it about?” Most writers panic at that question, and that’s because their premise isn’t strong enough.
What we need is a character, a goal, and stakes. For The Lord of the Rings, the premise would be “A hobbit makes a long journey to destroy a magic ring before an evil dark lord takes over the world.” Harry Potter would be something like “A young wizard must learn magic in order to defeat a powerful evil wizard before he becomes immortal.”
(That one sentence covers the whole series, but sometimes you have to start that way.)
Always start big with your premise. Always go for more vague rather than specific, and then we’ll shrink the scope as we discover the details. In this stage, we don’t need to know anything except the main character, their goal, and what will happen if they don’t reach that goal. Don’t worry about names, setting, or plot points.
As an example, I’ll use the premise for the fantasy novel that I wrote (the one I mentioned earlier). The premise is this: The last man who can speak with animals must journey into a hostile war-torn country to save his only friend before an evil prophet kills her.
In this premise I have my main character referred to only by a defining characteristic—he can talk to animals. Don’t give your character a name in this stage. This man’s goal is to save his friend. If he doesn’t, she will die.
Trust me, this gets absolutely nowhere near the whole story of the book. There are sub-plots, backstories, a dozen characters—all with their own arcs—and the journey that Brenn takes to find his friend takes him years, and a whole lot happens in that time. But notice how none of it was in my premise.
And that’s basically all there is to it. You have a character, a goal, and stakes. Technically speaking, you could use this one-sentence premise to write a tiny story right now with a beginning, a middle, and an end—like this:
“Once upon a time a hobbit found an evil magic ring that a fallen Maia needs to take over the world. The hobbit walked across the continent and dropped the ring into a volcano. The evil Maia was destroyed and the hobbit took a nice boat trip to a place where there was no jewelry to worry about. The end.”
Remember this: keep your premise short, simple, and vague. It’s only after you have a solid, clear premise that you can move on to fluffing up the details.
Until next time, my friends. Happy writing.
