As you saw on the overview page of the 'How To Write a Novel' section, found here, the first step in writing a novel is to explore and refine your story idea. Why would you want to do this? Your story idea is the foundation of your novel. Everything you plan and write will be built upon this foundation, so you will be best served by a solid foundation that you've laid down with careful thought and foresight. Exploring and Refining your story idea is about considering all of the core elements that your story needs, putting your own spin on them and considering what possibilities are available in terms of what direction to take the story itself, once you start plotting or writing. This page covers the process of taking your raw story idea and forging it into a dense Premise with a meaningiful Theme and Enticing Possibilities. I'll break it down into these sections:
Keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to do one after the other. Your premise and themes will feed into each other and can be developed simultaneously, if that is what you prefer. Both will influence the story possibilities open to you. You can also refine and update all three as you write, although you need to be careful not to change things too much, lest you end up in an endless cycle of changing your story. Rather reference and refine it while you plot or write and make any big updates or changes after finishing at least one draft of your story.
Now some of you might do something resembling this process on the fly, while you write. That's fine, if that works for you. If you're writing excellent stories, you'll most likely find that you're doing all of this mentally or simply less formally, anyway. However, why not take some of the load off of your poor brain? Instead of having to juggle all of this mentally while you try to write your story, why not write it down in a more formal process and then reference the result as you write? Something to consider.
Before you can sit down and start crafting your narrative with any measure of effectiveness, you're going to have to figure out a few things about your story. Your premise can help you do that: Formulating a premise can help you to think about all of the necessary story elements before you start writing.
The formal definition of the word premise is: "an assertion or proposition which forms the basis for a work or theory". A premise in creative writing has taken on a subtly different meaning from the formal definition. A narrative premise can be defined as: "The core idea that drives the plot, characters and theme of the story". Crucially, a complete story is built around characters and conflict. Captivating characters, in turn, require goals and motivation. Thus, bringing this all together, a narrative premise can be defined as "The core idea that drives the plot, characters and theme of the story, with the story being centred around characters, their motivations, goals and the conflicts that they face."
So, to craft a premise you need to consider following elements within the context of your raw story idea:
Answering these questions in relation to your story idea is the basis for creating a concise premise that conveys everything that you need to know about your story. Formulating a premise forces you to consider all of the necessary and sufficient elements of a story. Keep in mind, this is not your plot, so don't get into too much detail. Just the core. Let us quickly go through each one.
Who is the main character in your story? You don't need their history or detailed description here, just some core details. Ask yourself: What are their defining attributes? A good template to follow is to include who they are and one or two descriptive words. You can include a name if you have one already, but you don't have to.
Some examples:
You'll build out this character either during the plotting phase or, if you're a pantser, while writing. For now, you just need enough so that you can answer the next question.
Once you know who your story is about, you can consider the important question of why they're doing what they're doing. What are their goals and motivations? What do they want? You need to give your character something to strive towards. Once again, you don't need details yet, just identify the broader issue at hand for your story. If appropriate, integrate elements of your themes into the "why?" of your story.
Remember that your main character's goal should have deep meaning to them and be plausible. Your readers will notice if you've just slapped any old goal into place, as it won't gel with your character.
Below are some possible avenues to consider to figure out the "why?" of your story. You can use multiple of these ideas together to come up with a goal:
The primary "why?" of your story will be the anchor point for the actions of your main character for every scene that they feature in. Consider that each scene or sequel will have a character acting or reacting. Their goals and motivations that drive your story forward in each scene should be consistent with the overall "why" of your story as captured in your premise.
A story where there are no obstacles or conflicts is going to be quite brief and boring. Your readers NEED your characters to have some obstacles to overcome. What is stopping them from achieving their goals or meeting their desires? Any good story has plenty of conflict. Conflict keeps the reader invested and wondering: What happens next? How do they overcome this hurdle? When do they achieve success? What are the consequences for failure? Conflict is another good place to consider integrating your themes.
Not all conflict is created equal. Conflict that makes sense within the context of your story and themes will be more engaging than conflict just for the sake of it. The obstacles and conflicts that arise in the scenes of your story should be consistent with the primary conflict that you identify while formulating your premise. In turn, the way that your characters go about resolving these conflicts should remain consistent with their goals, motivations and character traits.
Remember, you don't have to get super specific about the conflicts in your premise, that will came later when you develop the plot of your story. For now, just identify the core conflict for your character.
The two sources of conflict to consider are:
It is a good idea to have both internal and external conflict in your story. Internal conflict allows you to showcase your character's humanity, thereby giving the reader something to relate to or empathise with. Showing how your character overcomes internal conflict is also an excellent way to develop and grow your character.
Examples of Internal sources of Conflict:
Examples of External sources of Conflict:
Having multiple sources of conflict allows you to create a more varied narrative. You can change up which conflict is the most pressing in any given scene, thus avoiding too much repetition and monotony. You can also use conflict to grow your characters and show how they change their approach to solving problems.
The last element to the premise is: How does your story end? It is generally considered optional as part of your premise. You might not have decided exactly how to end the story before you start writing. It is still worth thinking about while exploring and refining your story idea. Maybe jot down a few possibilities to keep in mind while you plan and write your novel. Or come up with the ending itself. It is up to you.
Your ending is also a good place to consider your themes. Your story ending might be used to bring your themes to conclusion, for example:
You'll want to keep your premise quite short. Firstly, you want to keep it about the core of your story, don't limit your narrative by adding too much detail. Secondly, if its short and concise, its easier to refer back to it while you're writing. You don't want to read long paragraphs to double-check that your story is staying consistent with your core vision.
Finally, don't worry too much about making your premise catchy and exciting. Its purpose is to keep you on track through the long arduous task of planning and writing the story. If you want something to entice readers or publishers, then you'll want to look into creating a logline once you're done with the process of exploring and refining your story idea.
I mention a few times above where you could integrate elements of your themes into the process of formulating your premise. But what exactly is a theme? A theme is a central idea or message that your story conveys. Don't confuse it with a lesson (that's more of a moral). Your story can have multiple themes, list them all for yourself while you explore & refine your story idea.
Some possibilities:
This list is not exhaustive, do further research online if you're looking for a theme that tickles your fancy. Every scene is a potential candidate for integrating your theme, but don't force it. Work your themes into the events and character actions/reactions throughout your story, where it makes sense to do so.
By consiciously considering your theme, you also give yourself the opportunity to consider what viewpoint you want to convey. You're writing YOUR story, so you can decide what viewpoint to take on any theme that you integrate. Consider your own beliefs and feelings about the themes that you choose, and decide if you want to explore those or if you want to flip the script and explore the opposite of what you, yourself, might identify with.
If you haven't managed to explicitly integrate your theme into your premise, don't worry. Just keep your list of themes handy while you write and integrate your themes into your scenes where it makes sense to do so.
Once you've formulated your Premise together with developing your themes, you have a solid foundation from which to work. The last task to discuss is the process of exploring the possibilities available to you given your Premise and Themes. For any given combination of story idea, premise and themes, you could craft many vastly different stories. Not only will your writing style and character development heavily influence the story, but you can decide on various directions to pursue. Exploring the possibilities is in essence the start of formulating ideas for the plot of the story (What is Plot: It is what happens in the story. The cause-and-effect sequences of events, actions and reactions that make up the story). You don't want to write out a whole plot just yet, however. You want to keep your options open. So consider many different possibilities, write them down and then curate them as you develop your plot, plot outline and write, later on.
A large part of your story will be take place in the areas between the questions "what do they want?" and "why can't they have it?". Some of the questions you might ask yourself are:
For each of the above questions, you can identify and note down multiple possible avenues to explore further in your writing. Exploring the possibilities offered by your story idea, premise and themes is an open-ended task, don't limit yourself to considering only what I listed above. Get creative.
Remember, explore the possibilities. Don't limit yourself to your first thoughts or ideas. Write down all of them. Try to think outside the box, come up with YOUR take on a story idea. Remember to jot down ideas you have later under your list of possibilities, you don't have to stop thinking about it once you move into the writing process.
We can summarise the process of exploring & refining your story idea in the three bullet points:
I believe the value in exploring and refining your story idea as outlined above lies in the following:
Thank you for reading, I hope you find this information useful. Please share it with a friend or colleague. Also check out our blog. It isn't updated that often right now (see here if you're curious as to why), but it has some interesting posts.
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