Let’s Talk Premise

Episode 11

Let’s Talk Premise

Anne Hawley & Rachelle Ramirez

We have a special treat for you this week — a little audio sample for you of something from Module 5 of our Story Path course on the importance of premise in your story. 

When it comes to what your story is about, the answer you give to others and the answer you need yourself to write the book can be completely different. One helps others find your book, the other helps you find your story. Rachelle Ramirez and Anne Hawley dive into how and why to distill your premise down to its essence.  

Story Path is included in the Happily Ever Author Club. If you want to hear more about our Story Path course and the Happily Ever Author Club, click here.

TRANSCRIPT:

(upbeat music)

Rachelle: Hey Anne.

Anne: Hey, Rachelle, how you doing?

Rachelle: Good, thanks for sitting down for an interview with me today.

Anne: My pleasure.

Rachelle: I have been preparing, and you've been helping me with, this premise module, and it really made me think I needed to interview you about this (Anne chuckles) because many years ago, when we first met... First of all, I felt like I had found a kindred spirit. And you invited me to this fancy Italian restaurant, and I'm, "Whee!" (hands swishing) 

We go to this restaurant, and we decided we're gonna talk about writing woes, writing adventures. Let's just get together and talk about writing. And we go on, and on, and on about our stories, our writing, our plans, and about minutes into the dinner you lean in and you say, "Okay, I get the characters. I see the events, the interesting ideas you have, but what's your story about?" 

And I was like (laughs), "Wait a second. I just spent the last fifteen minutes telling you what my story was about. What do you mean?" I was dumbfounded. I didn't know how to answer that question. 

And it was in that moment that it was like, it occurred to me that that was not only my problem, but the solution to my problem. It wasn't about, oh, how am I gonna combine all these five stories together and make this this dynamic piece. It was that I didn't know what my story was about. I needed a premise. I needed one guiding principle that was going to put this story together. 

And that was just this huge pivotal moment for me, that changed my writing life, I think, forever. So thank you for that.

Anne: Oh, well, my pleasure. It's been a big one for me, too. (both laughing)

Rachelle: I'm wondering how... It just seemed like such a genius question. Is that something that you just regularly ask people or was that just, was I just (laughs) going on, and on, and on, and on, and on?

Anne: Well, it is now. I mean, certainly, it had become one by the time we had that conversation, but I had to learn it. I had to read books, take classes, you know, really hone in on this. And it's pretty hard to find really specific, helpful information about it, which is part of the reason we're doing this Module Five.

Rachelle: Right, right.

Anne: But a book called "The Art of Dramatic Writing" by Lajos Egri, which we will probably link to somewhere, was a really big help in this regard, better than anything else I'd found.

Rachelle: So one of the things that you guys should know is that when then I said, "But wait, what's your story about?" Anne actually had an answer. (both laughing) So, Anne, what is your story? What was your story about?

Anne: Well, let me give a little background before we disclose the premise of my story that I finally came up with. 

I think even today, if somebody asks me that question, I will tend to, to answer this way: “Well, it's about a gay portrait artist in Regency London.”

And there's nothing wrong with that as a description of what my book is about. It describes the subject, right? It tells me, you know, it tells you what kind of main character is in it, and it's gonna help the right audience find it, right? It's gonna be listed under LGBTQ on Amazon, and historical fiction, and maybe some art and artists category. 

But that's kind of a product placement piece. It's something that I can tell you in case you want to buy my book, but it doesn't really tell me what my story was truly about, why I set out to write it in the first place. 

And then I made this discovery that if you stick the word HOW after the word ABOUT...so instead of saying, "Well, it's about a gay portrait artist in Regency London," you say, "it's about HOW a gay portrait artist in Regency London" dot, dot, dot.”

And then you have to fill that in, right? And I had to fill that in. 

Well, my main character, he does a lot of things. He encounters, he paints a portrait that becomes very famous. He falls in love with the subject of it. He becomes estranged from his family. He endures all forms of homophobia. So what do I choose to fill in that blank? 

And I chose by asking myself why I was telling the story, why I made my character and his lover basically celebrities. We would think of them as celebrities today, in today's society, who can't escape the public eye. It was the forbidden aspect of their love, in that time. Homosexual sex was still, technically, a capital crime. It was certainly still a crime that you could lose everything for. 

And so I had to ask myself, "Why did I make these characters publicly visible? Why did I want to contend with that aspect, the forbidden aspect of their love affair? Why was I so passionate about that?" So it got down to, it was a story ABOUT HOW: ABOUT HOW a gay portrait artist in Regency London is prohibited by society from expressing his true nature. And I went from there.

It's like it's about how there wasn't even a word, not a decent word that you'd use in conversation, for what these, what he is, what they are. And it's about how he's going to lose, like everything, his reputation, his livelihood, his standing in society, maybe even his freedom. It would be possible for him to go to jail if someone in society decides to rat him out. That's what I was really interested in the most.

Rachelle: So what did you actually come up with for you? Did you distill it down to this is the core? This is the premise-

Anne: Uh-huh.

Rachelle: What'd you actually come up with?

Anne: It took a while, (laughs) but I wound up with "Nonconformity demands sacrifice."

Rachelle: Okay, but that's kind of general. Or that could be Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou. It could be a suffragette. What made that about your story? What made that particular for you? How does it tell-

Anne: Well it, the point is it's not particular to my story. It's true of my story, but the premise statement, what was really hard for me to encompass, and this is what Lajos Egri says in "The Art of Dramatic Writing," it should apply to more than one story. It should be a broad moral-of-the-story kind of idea. 

And I think the bigger question is how did I arrive at this for my story, which is effectively, it's a love story, right? It's basically a love story if you want to put it in one of our Story Type categories. 

But you've gotta boil it down, says Egri, to a noun, a verb, and a noun. And you've got to identify your character, your protagonist, by the first noun, and then your antagonist's actions are kind of summarized in the verb in the middle, and it describes what the protagonist has to face and face down. 

And then the second noun, the third word in the statement is where, basically, it's a shorthand for where the protagonist ends up after facing the conflict from the antagonist. 

So I was able to see that, for me, my main character is a gay man, meets the love of his life in a time when his form of love was forbidden, and he has to face the fact that he can't keep pretending to conform. He's gotta come out of the closet in some way. 

So “nonconformity” became the first word because the inciting incident is he meets the love of his life, and suddenly his careful conformity to the rules of society becomes something that he can't maintain. 

And then the verb in the middle, the antagonist, which in my case is an antagonistic force, so it's society's, a strict and rigid society, upper-class society, it's what that antagonist brings to bear on my protagonist, and the antagonist, it’s mores, prejudices, and even laws, right? And at the climax of the story, it gangs up on my protagonist and his lover and forces him to make a choice. It demands a sacrifice, and it demands, in effect, that they split up and play more conforming roles. 

So “demand” seemed like a really good middle word. So “Nonconformity demands…” and then the third word, which came naturally: Sacrifice. “Nonconformity demands sacrifice.” That's what has to change. These two men, they can't get what they want 'cuz I... For a long time, I went along with the Rolling Stones song, as my premise statement 'cause I couldn't think of anything better. You can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. 

So the sacrifice is giving up the hope or the dream of a settled and stable, married kind of life. They can't have that. They have to sacrifice it. “Nonconformity demands sacrifice.”

Rachelle: So it sounds like what you're saying is that the premise is really tied into the stakes that we were talking about in the last module.

Anne: Yeah, it absolutely is, and I was surprised, when I really started putting these things together just for this module and to talk about it, how much you have to understand what's at stake to be able to write your premise statement. 

It doesn't have to be specific. My premise statement does not say "demands sacrifice of marriage and a normal happy life." You want get that, you want to know it, but you need to then take it back out of your premise statement and generalize it across more kinds of stories. 

But yeah, his livelihood and his freedom, my main character, are at stake, right? He will lose his livelihood. He's a portrait painter. No one will hire him if he's found out, y'know If he's "found out," and if he doesn't give up his love affair with an even more famous and visible public figure. 

And if I didn't have those stakes in there, the story wouldn't exist. It would just be a regular courtship love story, right? And the big difference between a courtship romance and a forbidden love story is that in the romance, the question isn't whether the lovers are gonna get together. We know they are. That's why we read romances. It's only how. How are they gonna get together? 

But in a forbidden love story, the question is whether they can overcome these external forces to get together and stay together, and how much it's gonna cost them to do that. So the essential sort of love story/courtship romance/love story premise, is that “love thrives when the lovers sacrifice for each other.” Something like that. 

But it doesn't work for my story. That wasn't the story I wanted to tell. My lovers are forced to sacrifice by an external agency, unwillingly. And that was really what I wanted to explore.

Rachelle: So did that mean, once you figured that out, once you finally had that pinned down, did that mean that you ended up cutting a lot of your story, or building your story, or what happened? What happened with that?

Anne: It certainly let me see clearly where I had some scenes that didn't really emphasize the idea of the premise. 

For example, because it's a love story, and it's got kind of a certain steamy element to it, I had written some extra love scenes that really took place in an environment where there was absolute safety and no danger of discovery. And, you know, those had to go because I needed there to be at least a hint of discovery, or fear of discovery, each time these two characters come together intimately. 

So yeah, I was able to take scenes out because of that. And also to check that the same level of jeopardy, the stakes, the fear of being found out, doesn't keep repeating, right? I mean, I didn't have too much trouble having the level of jeopardy, the stakes inherent in the premise in each scene, but there were several scenes where I just sort of repeated the same level and of course you want your story to go up, up, up, up, up the slope of tension and stakes. 

So yeah, it did help me cut or change a certain number of scenes. But, because I was so aware, I mean, at least unconsciously I knew exactly what I wanted to be writing about, I did manage to get most of my scenes to contain that element of fear, and jeopardy, and the danger, the risk of being found out, and the price that it would cost each of them. So most of my scenes did have it. And finding the premise statement statement just helped me confirm that most of my scenes did fit.

Rachelle: Yeah, so one of the things that you said (laughs) to me once was "Rachelle, your story isn't all the cool shit that happens in your story." (both laugh) And I was, "Oh yeah, that's right." And that it, you know, it's not an elevator pitch. You had all these great things to say about it, but basically my question for you that I would just shoot back to you over, "Well, okay, then what good is it?"

Anne: Well, it's a gauge. Right? Once you've narrowed it down, you've done the very hard intellectual and emotional work of stripping all the cool shit away and just getting at what you meant to talk about when you decided to write this story. (I should put that in the first person.) What I meant to talk about when I decided to write this story. 

Remember that this premise statement is not marketing, right? It's not for the reader. It's for you to work with. It's for you to stick on your typewriter like Paddy Chayefsky and refer to it when you're writing or revising each scene. 

And so if someone said to me today, "Well, what's your book about?" I don't know that I would lead with "it's about how nonconformity demands sacrifice." I would probably still lead with "It's about how a gay artist in Regency London has to make sacrifices in order to have a love that is not allowed by their social circumstances." 

But underneath that is "Nonconformity demands sacrifice," and the word "sacrifice," of course, was the key word for me, and I had to dig that up, and find it, and dig deep to discover it.

Rachelle: Which really paid off, because it was a gut-wrenching story. (both laugh)

Anne: Yeah, it still gets to me once in a while if I reread parts of it, because I do think I managed to convey what I set out to convey that... My personal belief is that, you know, happily ever [after] romance doesn't really (laughs) exist. And it's not something that I know much about or that I want to write about. But man, you know, if I want to write about what's forbidden and what society considers to be not normal, varying forms of intimacy and the different risks, that, I can write about. And that's what I set out to write.

Rachelle: Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I really appreciate it. My hope upon hope is that this helps other writers as much as it helped me because it helped me enormously. So thank you.

Anne: Well, I'm so glad. And we've got a lot in this module for writers who are taking the course to really dig in and do some of the work to find that premise statement. Hopefully it will save them some time, because mine took me about a month (laughs) to figure out and of daily work. And hopefully we can shorten that time for people.

Rachelle: Yeah. And mine took a year. So guys don't feel bad if, (Anne laughs) or more, maybe more.

Anne: Or more.

Rachelle: So don't (laughs) feel bad if it's not just (fingers snapping) coming to you. This is something that can take a while.

Anne: Yeah, yeah. It is, it is.

Rachelle: Okay. Thank you.

Anne: Thanks Rachelle. See ya. 

(upbeat music)