Premise vs. Story
How to write a novel that's actually a novel
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Dear Kate,
Okay, now you really have to explain the difference between premise and story!
- SFM
Dear SFM,
Thank you for indulging me!!
Last time, I answered a question from someone who’d discovered that a book with a similar premise to one of their ideas had already sold. This got me talking a bit about premise vs. story, which I didn’t dive into in that response but shamelessly begged someone to ask me about so I could give it more space. And of course you wonderful souls delivered!
In my response, I asked the question-writer if they had a story in addition to their premise—because there’s a difference, and I think it’s a pretty important one. You can read the original question and my advice here:
When I was first setting out to not just write a novel but finish a novel, I had a LOT of ideas swirling around. Sometimes they’d start with a scenario, or an issue between two characters, or a question, like “What if _______ happened?” (This is still how all of my ideas start!) But I had a world of trouble with the next steps. Okay, so two best friends are drifting apart over time but have to find their way back to each other. Aww. What happens? Alien kids are taking over a human middle school. Cool! What do they DO there and why do they do it? A girl can remember her own birth. Sounds freaky! What happens in chapter two??
I wrote that last one, and the first chapter is pretty compelling. And then the next god knows how many pages meander to absolutely nowhere. Because what I’d started writing had a cool premise. But it didn’t have a STORY. And because I didn’t know this difference yet, I was never able (back then) to figure out what the key problem with my manuscript was and therefore how to fix it.
A premise is a concept. It’s a starting point. A foundation. The basis on which the rest of your narrative builds.
I went to the dictionary (like one does!) and the word comes from the Latin praemittere, from prae ‘before’ + mittere ‘send.’ And then medieval Latin praemissa, ‘set in front,’ which became Old French premisse, which turned into Middle English, which then came to us.
The premise is the “before-send.” It’s the thing “set in front.” A premise is what an argument or undertaking is based on. It’s the proposition that forms the basis for a work.
A story is an account. It comes from the Latin historia, ie history. When you tell someone a history — when you tell someone a story — you’re giving them an account of what occurred.
The premise is the main idea. The story is how that idea is recounted on the page. The premise tells what the story is about, and the story is what actually happens. A premise is a summary of your story. IT IS NOT THE STORY ITSELF.
Whatever you’re writing — short stories, a novel, a memoir, anything with a narrative engine regardless of genre or style or how strong or subtle that engine might be — you need to be able to turn your premise into a story. A premise draws your reader in: “Gee, this sounds interesting!” A story is what they actually sit down and read.
When people ask you, “So, what’s your book about??” once you stop screaming “I DON’T KNOW, LEAVE ME ALONE!!!” what you give them is usually the premise. Your logline is a premise. Your hook is your premise. Your elevator pitch is your premise. “Three girls at a sleepover open a portal to another dimension.” “A knight in the 14th century searches for a fabled elixir.” “A governess has an affair with her employer’s secret mistress.” I’m just sitting here making these up, but you get the idea. Spies do espionage, kids save the world, big city hero meets a small-town love… A premise is the first thing we learn about a book, and usually the first thing we tell people when describing one. It’s Step One.
The story then contains all the elements that go into making a book a book: plot, character, setting, how does the manuscript sound, how does it feel to read it, who’s telling it to us, what’s their point of view, what are the central conflicts and issues and themes. The story is way too much to describe when you’re telling someone about a book! It’s all the pieces the come together—what happens, why it happens, the consequences and effects of what happens, the questions and emotions and themes and considerations that emerge as you read. Writing a story is a LOT harder than coming up with an initial premise.
The question-writer who worried about a book with a similar premise was talking about having a similar summary/concept/hook to another book. As some of you rightfully pointed out in that post’s comments, and in responses on Twitter, no two writers will ever tell a story in the same way. Two writers can have a similar premise (an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth and we all have only 48 hours to live!) but the stories they tell will invariably be different. Even if someone has “your” premise, they will never write your book.
The reason I think it’s important to harp on this distinction is that a lot of beginning writers (myself included!) struggle in their early novels and their early drafts to write the actual story. They (we!) write around the premise and don’t quite get into the story itself. We’re always a little outside our own narrative, promising the reader something that doesn’t fully arrive.
It’s hard to MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN on the page. I don’t just mean plot elements, or big flashy things like explosions and murders and capital-D Drama. Quiet books have stories too; they have things that draw us in and keep us turning the pages. I loved the novel BROOD by Jackie Polzin, which is about a woman raising chickens after a devastating loss. Not much happens in the novel. But while I’ve given you this one-sentence premise, there’s a whole novel you can sit down and read—a story about that woman and those chickens and the loss she experienced and the way she will change and grow and push on. Some novels are more or less plot driven than others, but a story is still there.
Some time after my weird, sorta sci-fi novel attempt, and a few other similar head scratchers, I found myself with an idea: a woman in NYC leaves her PhD program and moves to a cabin in the Adirondacks to start over.1 Unlike all those previous attempts, I suddenly had a sense of what happened next. The woman moved, she was an artist who wanted to be alone, she met a younger chef with a budding career and family pressures that did NOT include living in a small town in the Adirondacks, and they got together for what was only supposed to be a weekend fling. Spoiler: it’s not a fling. Things happen to drive them apart, and things happen to pull them together again. For the first time in my writing life, I found myself not just engaging with a premise. I was developing a story out of that initial idea.
It’s no coincidence that this was the first manuscript I was successfully able to finish and revise and eventually get an agent with and publish. (That publisher folded and I self-published the novel after I got the rights back, ahhhhhh publishing is such a rollercoaster.) I happened to have the story in mind before I started writing, but you don’t need to have an outline or a game plan in advance. Regardless of how you approach your story, the point is that the premise is only your starting point. You want to make sure there’s a story in there, and that as you’re writing/thinking/brainstorming/revising, you’re writing the story and not writing around it. You’re taking your premise and giving it a narrative arc, a beginning and a middle and an end, and no matter how you’re following or breaking the so-called rules and conventions of Western and specifically American storytelling, you’re doing so intentionally and with meaningful results.
This can take many drafts. This can be a life’s work.
This post is about craft, but it could also be about querying and pitching your work. When you’re writing a query letter, you’re telling the agent your book’s premise, and then you’re giving them a sense of the story so they want to read more. You aren’t telling the whole story (that’s what a synopsis does) but you’re showing them that there IS story. I’m not an agent, but I’d wager that they get a whole lot of query letters that tell the premise but don’t indicate that a story is in there. That something happens in the manuscript. That there’s meat on the bone, cake under the frosting, something for the reader to sink their teeth into.
A query letter can take the following structure: give the premise in a sentence (MY NOVEL is an 72,000 word historical novel about ________.), then take 150-200 words or so to give us a sense of the story. We don’t need more premise, we already got it! Tell us who your main character is. What’s their life like when the book opens? What happens next to change their normal world? What do they want as a result of this shift, and what’s standing in their way?
If you can’t indicate the story…it might be a sign to take a step back from your manuscript and make sure that you’re telling one. One way to do this is to take your starting premise and ask yourself what happens next. And then what happens as a result of what came before? Some people approach this by asking So what? Others frame is as: And then? I like to think in terms of cause and effect — what will this narrative moment lead to in my story that couldn’t happen without all of these pieces coming together in this one particular way? A premise can be the starting point for a million different stories. It’s an important step, but it’s only the beginning.
We talk a lot on here about agents and querying, so I’m excited to tackle the next question about publishing without an agent. As always, I look forward to reading your questions!
Good luck!
Kate
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I had just recently finished a PhD program and had definitely fantasized approximately 1,000,000 times about torching it all and moving to a cabin in the woods so yes, I believe in writing what you know although I also believe the magic comes in making it wildly different!