by Larry Brooks
You might be wondering this: So if concept and premise are simply summaries of what awaits in a story, what constitutes the story itself? What are the actual ingredients of a manuscript?
You’ve already encountered these ingredients in the grading exercises you’ve completed so far. You’ve graded your concept and your premise and then projected those changes across the arc of the story, with grades given on that evolved story arc. But ten other story elements and essences, which are forthcoming in the next two chapters, remain to be defined and used as benchmarks for a successful story. These are the building blocks that you put on the page, and what you may consider revising.
This brings us to a crossroads that doubles as a paradox. Those other elements and essences don’t stand a chance if the premise itself comes up short or is already compromised. They are nothing more than parts and piles, waiting for order. Premise is that order.
Premise doesn’t explain how things happen in your story. It is merely a summary of intention. And while it remains the most empowering of all the story elements and essences—you have no story without a premise, and thus it is essential—it is only the first step in creating a novel or screenplay. It is the vision for the story, without which you end up in chaos, hosting a wrestling match between your ideas and inspiration. And therein we stumble upon what might have been the undoing of your manuscript.
The Search for Story
Just possibly your premise wasn’t clear when you began writing. It wasn’t finished. The draft you wrote from that incomplete premise became, in effect, a search for the story, and when you found it somewhere along that road—if you found it at all—you proceeded from that point without returning to the first page armed with this newly discovered context.
Searching for the story while you’re writing it is like setting out from Seattle for a drive to … well, you’re not sure. You just head east. Or south. Wherever the road takes you. So you drive, and the scenery is indeed gorgeous for a while. But then you begin thinking about where this road is taking you, so you try out a few options. You change freeways in Denver and head south. But it’s too hot in New Mexico, and you don’t know anybody there. So you head east into Texas and then up through Oklahoma toward Chicago. You’re still not sure where this trip will end up. But you never reach Chicago because somewhere in Kansas you decide you want to lie on a beach in Miami. Yeah, that sounds good; let’s go there. So you break out a map on your smart phone and plot the best course to Florida, and off you go.
All of this is fine if you’re alone, or if taking in the scenery is your only purpose, or if you have no reason for the drive other than killing time with interesting pit stops. But when you’re writing a novel or a screenplay, you are not alone; the objective isn’t the scenery. You’re driving a bus loaded with readers who bought a ticket based on your promise via the premise. If you’ve been searching for the story this whole time, they’re not sure of the destination. But now you can finally tell them, twenty hours and two hundred pages into the journey: You’re heading full steam toward Miami. But … is your current story, the one that isn’t sure what it is, the best way, the most rewarding way, the most dramatic way, to reach Miami?
It probably isn’t. Because in a story that works, every page is written in context to the author’s full and informed knowledge of how that page fits into a bigger picture. In fact, if that bigger picture is still fuzzy, the journey has been chaos up until the moment you decided where you were going after all. And now, suddenly, you’re in a hurry—you finally have a plot—so you rush into it. Sure, you gave your passengers some good times, but this is supposed to be commercial travel, not the whimsy of the driver. And so the trip itself is judged a disaster. It takes eight days to complete a four-day journey. When you translate that experience on paper, other routes from Seattle to Miami suddenly look more appealing, scenery included.
That’s what happens when you use your draft as a tool, applied within your process, to find your best story, and then actually submit that draft with the word Final stamped on it somewhere. When you find your best story—this, too, is an outcome determined solely by the astuteness of your story sensibility—you need to start another draft, or at least revise the current chaotic draft to the extent that it seems like a new draft, in context to the discovered destination and route.
That new, concise plan, developed based on a known big picture and destination, in all likelihood will work. Or it will at least work better than the draft written without that clarity. That is the plan you need to develop and polish.
Hear me clearly: I’m not dumping on a process that uses drafts to search for and find the story. However you search for it, if the process works for you, it is a good thing. But here’s what happens to too many writers, too often: They don’t revise their current draft or write a new one once they land on a story in the middle of that search draft. They keep the initial segment of the draft, the pages that are without context to the newly discovered core story, with all its side trips and unplanned stops and breakdowns and dead ends, and proceed from that point with a more informed context, labeling it a final draft that merely has a focused back end (now that the author has finally found the story) and a front end that never really knew where the story was headed.
If that’s you—you may already be squirming as you read this—take heart. This chapter will give you guidelines and criteria that will help you focus on creating the best story possible, the one you promised in your premise, regardless of how you searched for your story.
First and foremost, you need to get that premise right.
Sometimes it takes a chaotic draft to get there, in which case you end up with a new and better premise for the effort. But nonetheless, you need a final premise, one that meets all of the requisite criteria and standards (see the previous chapter), and then—wait for it, because this is the critical moment—you stick to that core story.
That’s the goal: a solid, compelling, dramatic core story. And it begins with a premise that earns those same adjectives.
When you have a criteria-meeting premise, you know your core dramatic story from the first page, at least in terms of the four major structural parts told in sequence, separated by five major story milestones that render it dramatic, evolving, and satisfying. You know that it is the best core story available: one that fulfills the promise made by the premise.
Can that core story change? Certainly it can. Within the draft you may find an even better twist or context for the story, which, when adopted, actually shifts the premise as well. Premise and core story are the same things; when you change one, you change the other.
How to Screw Up Your Premise Within a Draft
Let me count the ways. There are dozens of them, but they can be grouped into toxic categories of story killers that murder a huge percentage of submitted manuscripts. I know this because I’ve culled this data from my database of hundreds of dissected and analyzed unpublished stories submitted to me for story coaching over the past three years. And usually I can spot this fatal flaw right there in the premise, which I always ask for prior to the read.
See the case studies at the end of this book to see how these dark missteps gobble up the stories they appear in, despite the best intentions of their authors.
Rejection is all but guaranteed when you are guilty of the following storytelling sins. For each, I include an example of a story that commits this sin, as well as a solution for revising the story killer in question.
1. You change lanes in the middle.
Your concept currently defines a reasonably compelling story arena. We’re in; it sounds great. And yet, the story never goes deep into this arena, or doesn’t stay there, or doesn’t leverage the compelling power of the arena originally granted to your premise. For example, your concept promises a story in which a character uses paranormal gifts to make dreams come true and read minds at will. And yet within the story, while your hero has that talent, and while she may use it from time to time, i
t never surfaces as a catalyst for a core story that depends on it, which was the promise of the premise itself. In a broken story, that original conceptual notion doesn’t remain at the core of the story’s spine; the story takes a twist and becomes something else. It’s like a bad sweater: It’s just there, unseen and unworn in the bottom drawer, exerting no story influence whatsoever.
This issue also crops up at the premise level. You promise a story that is about a woman finding her lost mother because she can’t stand the thought of her dying alone. There’s also an inheritance at stake. That’s the crux of the premise. Then, in the middle of the story, she meets a guy and falls in love, but he’s married. Suddenly the story is all about that. The quest to find the mother fades into the distance in favor of a doomed love story. It’s a different story now, and not the one promised in the premise. It’s a lane change, and it’ll get your story rejected faster than that bad sweater at a debutante ball.
The fix is to connect any new plotlines to the original core story, making the new ones dependent upon the core. In the last example, the woman may have to choose between this blooming new love and the search for her mother. She must be willing to walk away from the guy if he doesn’t accept that she needs the freedom to pursue the search. The love story then becomes integral to the original core story, adding tension and urgency in the process. The mistake is to abandon the core story to pursue another avenue; the fix is to connect any new avenues back to the original core story.
The inability to stay focused on a core story is one of the leading story killers. Changing lanes in the middle might have been the cause of your rejection. If you think that’s the case, you now have the awareness to fix your story with a strategic, creative, brilliant redesign of your premise to accommodate the new idea. If not, perhaps you should trash the new plotlines altogether and stick to your original vision.
2. The story relies exclusively on an internal antagonist (personal demon) as the source of conflict.
Poor Beth. She’s unhappy. Her dad was an abusive schmuck, and as an adult Beth is hooking up with men just like him as she looks for approval and some sort of sick closure. Yes, I can make him love me, if it doesn’t kill me first. Man after man crosses her path (meaning you’re already relying on another lethal story killer, the episodic narrative spine). Nothing stands in the way of Beth’s happiness other than her inability to deal with her past, and nothing is stopping her from dealing with it. Yet, all we see in the story is one more schmuck dealing another cruel blow to her, and then she’s off to look for another loser, unhappier than before.
Her resolution? She wakes up one day and gets it. With a bolt of awareness, an epiphany of clarity, she decides she’s tired of hurting. So she fires that internal demon, sends it packing. Suddenly she’s going to be okay. The end. We were with her all the way.
That story doesn’t stand a chance. To revise this premise, you need to give the character a specific external goal to pursue (a story of how one man’s love could heal her), and something standing in her way (the guy is a priest). The thing that stands in her way must be external, a catalyst that creates a new awareness within her, and it must summon her inner demons. Once they surface, they are confronted, defeated, and banished. The character can’t just have a sudden, unmotivated realization. She needs to take steps to beat down her demons before she can create her own salvation by doing something, achieving something, or reaching a specific, definable goal.
Stories that simply chronicle a sequence of dark episodes, linked only by some internal demon and not in context to a solution or outcome, just don’t work. If this is your story, you need a better one that leverages your hero’s demons by showing them getting in her way while she’s focusing on a critical goal. You need a plot, not a diary of misery.
3. The resolution comes out of nowhere.
Having a character bolt upright in a moment of clarity is the worst possible resolution to a story. It’s right up there with having your hero read someone’s mind to learn the liberating truth, and it’s almost as bad as ending with a fist fight in which the hero knocks the villain senseless, a situation made even more ridiculous when the hero is a fourteen-year-old and the villain is a fifty-year-old ex-Marine.
That story crossed my desk recently. A young girl knocked the combat-toughened villain out with one punch, then lived happily ever after.
Another common mistake in this realm is the sudden materialization of an unexpected, unforeshadowed, and unlikely catalyst for the hero’s ability to resolve the story. Like, the ghost of the hero’s father appears before him in his darkest hour to assure him “You can do it, kid.” (That, too, recently came across my desk.)
Yes, the hero needs to be the catalyst for the ending, the primary mechanism of the ending, and he can indeed be summoned through the trial and error and growth we’ve seen over the course of the story (in other words, the character arc). But even then, the hero must do something, not be told to do something or stumble upon some sudden unlikely coincidence or good fortune (sometimes known as a deus ex machina, which translates to “God from the machine.” Leave God out of it and your ending will work better.)
The fix is to show a resolution that is put into motion by something the hero does, as a product of who he is now, a product of courage and growth, with cleverness and strength and willpower, rather than something the hero simply realizes. He can realize that action is required, but it is that action, not the realization of the need for it, that becomes the catalyst for the story’s resolution.
4. Your hero is saved rather than saving himself.
Your hero cannot merely observe the story’s resolution from the sidelines. He cannot be rescued. Rather, he must save himself by outwitting, outplaying, and outlasting a villain with an antagonistic agenda.
Here’s an example of how this mistake looks. The story is about a woman seeking to prove her son’s innocence in a murder case. The newly elected district attorney is after the son, cutting corners and hiding evidence to make himself look good. The police are in his pocket, and her son’s only hope is his mother. At the end, her hard work has gained the sympathy of a local reporter, who unearths new evidence that not only proves her son is innocent but also nails the corrupt D.A. for fabricating evidence. She’s grateful and ends up sleeping with the reporter, and they fall in love.
That’s a terrible ending. Any new evidence unearthed, any proof of her son’s innocence, needs to be the direct result of her own heroic efforts rather than luck or, even worse, someone else's actions.
5. Your premise is a life story.
Backstory is a beautiful thing, but an entire novel that serves as nothing other than a venue to reveal backstory is doomed. That only works when the story is both true and amazing. Your novel needs a singular dramatic spine from which the events unfold in the story’s current time frame.
Stories like this come from writers who forget they are writing within a genre and try to write a character-driven literary masterpiece. Character is drummed into us from the very beginning of our writing journey, and without the proper understanding, newer writers might overplay that element to the detriment of dramatic tension. That’s what happened to a writer I recently met with at a conference during a story review session. The pitch was good, and he had a massively powerful inciting incident—one that served as the story’s first plot point—that, after setting things up, would ignite the dramatic spine of the story. I asked him when that happened, what page it was on in the manuscript. He said page 290. I asked him how long the book was, and he said it was 410 pages. When I asked him why he was violating the core principles of structure to present a setup that was well over halfway into the narrative, instead of the optimal location of the 20th to 25th percentile, he said he wanted to nail the hero, to fully flesh him out using backstory and a vivid picture of his life before the hammer dropped. When I told him this was a fatal structural flaw, one driven by his over-weighing of the function of character within his story—which was a t
hriller, by the way—he didn’t know what to think. Then he said it had been rejected eight times already, and then I just looked at him. Silence reigned. Then I suggested he bone up on the principles of structure and the tropes of the thriller in general and sent him away with specific resources to do just that. He’d ruined a perfectly good premise by not knowing how to execute it … in this case, by allowing character to trump dramatic tension, within a genre that lives and dies by the level of its conceptually driven drama.
Another way writers shoot their manuscripts in the foot in this regard is to deliberately, as the core of their concept and premise, set out to tell the life story of a fictional hero. This results in a series of anecdotal, periodic, episodic sections, not unlike a collection of short stories that feature the hero in all of them, without a central dramatic spine that gives the hero something to do, a reason to do it (stakes), something blocking that effort, with threat and urgency exerting pressure all the while, within a vicariously delicious setting and situation. The fix for this? Go back to the drawing board and learn to write a novel. Discover how the novels in your genre are conceived, structured, and resolved relative to both dramatic arc and character arc. In other words, learn the basics of novel writing.
Sometimes the writer just isn’t ready. Sometimes the story is bigger than the writer’s ability to pull it off. Both reasons explain a significant percentage of rejections. The save is easy: Learn the craft from square one. You can’t invent how a novel unfolds; that’s a universal model, a given. Rather, you can invent how your story unfolds within those parameters, freeing you to be as creative and focused as you choose … as long as you don’t color outside the lines of the basic principles of storytelling.
