Stories can have some wild, wild premises. When it comes to the beginning of the story, the catalyst if not the chronological beginning, we’ll accept a coincidence that would break the entire story if it were the hinge of the resolution- even if it’s the tripwire that leads to the eventual resolution. Two estranged lovers who live on opposite sides of the world meet at an airport; a magician and a McGuffin wash up on the same island; a volcano goes off and reveals the passage to Elysium. As conclusions, these are deadly- deus ex machina and all that; as questions, they are intriguing and interesting.

But let’s expand our idea of ‘premises.’ A premise can be a relationship situation, a catalyzing event, but that’s not the only way we pitch a story. A story’s premise can be time travel, gunslinging, a cool magic system, secret identities, romantic tension, imminent apocalypse, completed apocalypse, or any thousand other things. Thus, one possible premise of the Lord of the Rings is the Ring itself, the central question of its destruction. For another example, I could premise The Anubis Gates, a wonderful novel by Tim Powers, either as ‘time-travelling to 19^th century England’ or as ‘sorcerer meets millionaire meets werewolf meets clown meets crossdresser meets Byron meets protagonist,’ to heavily paraphrase the back cover of my copy. Both ‘premises’ are interesting, in different ways, but the multiplicity- and how these elements actually appear in the story- raises an interesting question for us.

Why Does He Keep Reading?

¹Read enough fiction, analyze it enough, and you’ll realize that different stories keep a hold on you in different ways. One way stories get ahold of us, especially at the beginning, is the premise. ‘Time travel’ is, to me, an interesting idea. So is ‘fantasy & espionage in the 1950s’, as in Declare. Other sorts of premises include magic systems- ‘What if superpowers were derived from going through terrible moments?’ or ‘What if there were a way to get from world to world?’ (Worm and The Magician’s Nephew respectively). The question we need to ask here is: why does the reader keep reading?

See, it’s perfectly fine, even standard, for the premise to be what gets the reader into the first page. Unless he just picked up a random book or is going by author name (or series), one of the premises probably is the initial hook. The problem comes when the book doesn’t apply other hooks- particularly those of character (or plot). If The Lord of the Rings relied on its premise, nobody would ever get past the first chapter because they’d be bored out of their minds. After all, why care about the birthday party when you’re just there for the Ring? Nor would they be much heartened by most of the rest of the book, where the Ring menaces rather than taking center stage, where half of each of the two latter volumes is devoted to non-Ring elements of Middle Earth, away from the Ringbearer.

Why do people keep reading The Lord of the Rings? Yes, in part it is the plot, but even here we have a question: why care about the plot? It is not, after all, real. Once time dwindles away the entertainment factor of whatever premise first attracted the reader, what keeps him? For The Lord of the Rings, we can point to any number of factors: the characters, the setting, the prose, the wisdom, the plot. All of these work together; Tolkien doesn’t just rely on ‘what will happen to the Ring’ to keep us engaged.

The problem of relying too much on a nifty premise is that nifty premises are a dime a dozen. Execution is where it’s at. So unless the characters, the plot, the prose, unless the actual substance of the story is well-done, the premise’s appeal will burn out relatively quick. Even if the story isn’t painful to read, as bad prose can be, the reader’s attention will wane as he realizes that the version of the premise he came up with in his head was, frankly, about as good as what you’re giving him.

The role of a premise, then, is to excite the reader, to give him an image, and then to be supplanted. Our goal is to outdo the premise’s promise while also fulfilling it. So if I promise a hard-bitten spy novel in a world with more dimensions than most know, al a Declare, I must fulfil that promise and more: the world must be as intriguing as I implied, the plot as twisty, the espionage as intense. More, I should use the space afforded by the premise becoming a book to create characters who will pull the reader in, keep his interest in the long term and make all the rest meaningful by relationship.

Incidentally, remember this from the other end when you’re marketing. Just as over-fulfilling the promise of the premise is an important part of writing, so is giving out an accurate promise: premise essential to marketing, if you want to get people who will actually appreciate your story. This relationship between premise and execution should also elucidate to us why so many people have ‘ideas’ for books and so few people have actually worthwhile stories. A good premise means nothing if the execution is bad. Conversely, a dull premise in the right hands can be lightning.

Good execution, incidentally, isn’t the same for everybody. We all have different styles and different strengths. I am, I think, above-average when it comes to prose, but I struggle with certain elements of character and setting. In keeping the reader invested, though, everything counts. Really good prose means nothing, in the long term, if it’s in service of lackluster characters. At best it’ll attract a few people who are really into that sort of thing. So I work to make the characters and the setting excellent, to line up the plot and then twist it tight, to convey it all with the best prose I can manage, to keep an eye out for theology (theme).

We must seek not only to emphasize our strengths, as writers, but to confront and fix our faults, to strengthen our weaknesses. Some may remain, compared to others, but we can at least be better then ourselves a year ago. Component to both this self-improvement process and keeping the reader invested is consciousness of what we’re good at, what we’re relying on to keep the reader attached, and how those elements interact with each other.

Endpoint

The premise-pitch of a story is important, but it cannot be the skeleton or even the spine. The Silmarils weren’t enough for The Silmarillion, nor even their theft; time travel wasn’t enough for The Anubis Gates; a peripatetic alehouse wasn’t enough for Chesterton’s The Flying Inn. What each author added to the premise is what makes those stories incredible: characters, setting, theology, relationships, and complex, developing plots which don’t get stuck inside the premise even as they exploit it to the fullest. We can do the same: cater to our strengths, work on our weaknesses, carry the premise past itself and beyond. A well-done story takes the expectations the reader has and not merely expands upon them but develops new and unforeseen (but utterly fitting) dimensions thereof. So don’t rely on the premise, but do keep it in mind.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. I’ve not read it past the first chapter or so, and I don’t really recommend it (it’s grimdark written by a relatively ‘progressive’ atheist). I do know one of the premises, though! ↩︎