 Drama: June 23, 2021 Issue [#10816] |
This week: Tweaking the Premise Edited by: Joy  
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“I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.”
~ J. K. Rowling
“First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!”
~Ray Bradbury
“Prose is architecture. It’s not interior design.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
~ Douglas Adams
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about working on your premise to come up with a strong story or novel.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Suppose you came upon a fantastic idea and developed a premise from that idea. Yet, when you wrote your story, something wasn’t quite right. Just what happened here? Believe me, I am very familiar with such dramatic panic when that kind of a realization hits.
The problem must have started when you heeded someone’s advice that said something like, “Write your premise in very few words so the story idea sticks. Brevity is important in coming up with a premise.” Thus, for the sake of “brevity,” you probably let the most important aspects of your premise dissolve into a fog, and the resulting story or novel became the one where the idea drives it and not a character with a problem, to cause it to end as a rather dull story or one with cartoon characters.
To make it easy on yourself, you can surely go ahead and write a short one-or-two-sentence premise; however, to avoid a major headache later, try to include in your premise statement:
1. Your targeted goal: This could be the moral of the story or a strong character arc or a compelling action and adventure.
2. Your main character with desires and needs and a problem related to the original idea.
3. A situation or an obstacle.
4. (If possible) Resolution.
Now, what about this premise from a famous story? : “A young boy sets out on an adventure with an old warrior as his mentor to save a princess from a ruthless captor and to destroy a prison built by a large organization or an empire with the power to destroy an entire galaxy.”
Did you recognize the elements in this premise? Well, here they are:
Young boy: Luke Skywalker
Old Warrior: a Jedi-- named Obi-Wan Kenobi
The Princess and her Captor: Princess Leia and Darth Vader
The Prison: Death Star
You need to understand that premise is not the re-wording of your story idea. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a premise-story or a premise-novel with weak characterization and muddled up plot.
Now that you have a workable premise, the next step is milking it. At this point, the aspects of your story will be haphazard, but remember that you are taking a premise to meet its plot, and the road ahead will have many turns and dead ends to be explored, anyway. So, a few prospects to jot down while brainstorming are:
 Key story conflicts and possibly the main conflict (What if question is very useful here)
Your story-world or setting as to time and place
Possible must-have characters and secondary characters
The number of subplots, if a novel (name those subplots)
Subplots’ themes and possible scenes focusing on or relating to the main conflict, even if you aren’t sure you’ll use a subplot or not
Outline the most important scenes
By this time, you should have a pretty good idea how your plot is going to be. If you are sure you have story with a strong protagonist and hopefully an antagonist and/or a serious main conflict, go ahead and write up an outline for your story’s plot to include roughly…climax, rising action, middle, falling action, final outcome or ending’s status quo.
Then, if you’re not a fan of complicated outlines, like Stephen King who said, “Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses,” you can just start writing your story or novel after having thought out the elements and the possibilities of your premise.
I wish you the best with your premises and plotting.
Until next time! 
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The question for this issue is: When you work on premise and plot, do you suspect you may be wasting your time? Why?
This Issue's Tip: Dramatize the emotion of the character whose motivation will change. Make that emotion relate to the result of the events in the story.
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