How to Write a Premise for Your Book
- Jenna Moreci
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
HelloOoOo everybody!
Welcome to the very first episode of my course, How Writers Become Authors, a step-by-step guide to crafting your novel. We're here to start with the most basic step of plotting, and that's creating your premise. A premise is a brief summary of what your book is about. It's usually only one or two sentences, and this freaks a lot of writers out.
“How am I supposed to summarize this amazing, intelligent, complex story in just one or two sentences?”
Relax. You're overthinking it. Every piece of literature has a premise. If Wuthering Heights and The Color Purple have a premise, then your story should, too. I'm going to walk you through this process to show you just how easy and pivotal this step is to your book.
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Step 1: The Thought Dump
Before I create a premise, and really before I do any of the writing process, I create a thought dump. Another word for thought dumping is brainstorming. I just think “thought dumping” is a more appropriate visual, because you are dumping all of your thoughts into a Word document or a notebook.
Your goal is to get out any and all ideas you have regarding your story. They don't have to be organized. They don't have to be in sequential order. They don't even have to be good. You’re just trying to get your ideas out, so you have some kind of starting point to work with.
You need to accept right out of the gate that a lot of these ideas are not going to be used. In fact, some of these ideas are going to be terrible. And that's okay. No one's going to see this list except for you. Once you've exhausted your ideas for now, we can move on to our primary objective: creating a premise.
Step 2: Do I Have To Create a Premise Before I Write a Story?
You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. But creating a premise at the start will make it a lot easier for you to plan, organize, and plot your story. The premise’s job is to create a clear context for your story. It describes what your book is about in its simplest terms.
It's much easier to take a premise, the core concept of your story, and then build off of it in order to add depth and nuance. You can expand on your premise during the outlining phase or the drafting phase, or both.
It's like being assigned to write a paper in class. Your teacher wouldn't just say, “I don't know, there's, like, a war or something. Some countries were involved. It might have taken place in the early 1900s. Figure it out.” They'd say, “Write an essay about a specific conflict or incident that happened during World War II.”
That's what you're doing when you create a premise. You're giving yourself a broad topic that you will expand upon in your story.
Step 3: Premise Basics
As I said, a premise is usually one or two sentences long, and it typically accomplishes two things. The premise establishes the main character—or characters, if there is more than one. Please be very mindful that not every character matters when it comes to the premise. You may have a lot of important characters, but we're specifically talking about the protagonist, the main and leading character in your story.
Step 4: Conflicts and Goals
The premise also establishes the story's main conflict, or the protagonist's main goal, or both. Most, if not all, novels revolve around some type of conflict that the main character is trying to navigate. Maybe the main character is trying to survive an alien invasion. The conflict is the danger presented by said alien invasion.
But sometimes a story doesn’t follow a conflict per se. We may just be following a character as they try to achieve some goal. The character could be trying to win a beauty pageant or trying to snag a coveted promotion at work.
But a lot of the time, a story has both a conflict and a goal, and they're often interconnected. Say your book follows an elf who is fighting against an evil wizard who is threatening to destroy their home. The elf’s conflict is with the evil wizard, and their goal is to save their home. See how these two things are connected?
Step 5: Organize Your Ideas
Now take a look at your thought dump. Sift through all the ideas you've generated. Can you pinpoint a main character and a potential goal or conflict for them to navigate? If so, you've got a premise. You've created a clear context for your story.
Step 6: What if My Premise Sounds Generic?
I'm going to hold your hand while I say this. If you're creating a premise for your story, I can guarantee it's been done before. Because the premise is the simplest, most basic summary of your story. There are only so many dilemmas in this world and even in fictional worlds.
On top of that, certain conflicts are necessary and even expected in a genre. If you're writing a murder mystery, the conflict is almost definitely going to revolve around a mysterious murder that needs to be solved. If you're writing a dystopian story, the conflict is going to revolve around an oppressive society or a degraded environment. And if you're writing romance, the conflict is going to hinge on whether or not a romantic relationship defies the odds.
All that to say, if your premise sounds familiar, relax! It just means you have a good understanding of genre expectations. You can breathe originality into your story later in the writing process.
So now that you know what a premise is, let's take a look at some popular pieces of fiction to see it in action.
Example: Romeo and Juliet
Let's break down the premise for Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet. We need to figure out what the conflict is, as well as the main characters. The main characters are Romeo and Juliet, and the conflict is that these two come from feuding families, but, uh oh! They've fallen in love. Thus, we could write the premise like this:
Romeo and Juliet, two teenagers from rival families, fall in love, sparking a war between their families with dire consequences.
Example: The Hunger Games
Now let's take a look at everyone's favorite YA dystopia, The Hunger Games. Who's our main character? That would be Katniss Everdeen. What's her conflict? Well, her sister just enlisted in a deadly tournament, so now Katniss has to take her place in the tournament and find a way to survive. Thus, we could probably write the premise of The Hunger Games like this:
In order to save her sister, Katniss Everdeen has to enter the Hunger Games and defend herself to stay alive.
Final Considerations
See? It’s really not that hard. If you're still having trouble creating your own premise, take a look at other pieces of fiction and see if you can nail down their premises. This will make it much easier to create your own.
So that's all I've got for you today!
If you need any additional help in figuring out how to create your premise, you can check out the worksheet listed here. Once you nail down this piece of information, it'll be a lot easier for you to move forward through plotting and the rest of the writing process.
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