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My best ideas come to me when I’m doing laundry, vacuuming, grocery shopping.
My best ideas come to me when I’m doing laundry, vacuuming, grocery shopping.
At first you may have
a million ideas, and you could be driving to Walmart for milk, and this one
scenario in your mind starts out like a bit of swirling dust and gathers into a
raging tornado just beyond your windshield. And your pulse goes into overdrive.
That heart-pounding
scenario in your head is an idea, a situation, a concept. It is not the
premise of your book, but concept is the first step toward
your premise. TWEET THIS
- Your Premise is the germ of your book.
- Your Premise is your entire novel summed up in one single sentence (and showing the moral arc)
When I started to
write Shadowed in Silk, I had the idea of a woman
who is married to a philandering alcoholic, and who falls helplessly in love
with an honorable Christian man. A good idea, but I needed to develop this into
my premise, not only to sell my novel to an agent or acquisitions editor, but most
especially to potential readers.
Besides, since my
audience was CBA (Christian Booksellers Association) how was I going to write
this book that dealt with the difficult subject of spousal abuse, divorce, and
falling in love with another man without being called a heretic?
I believe in the
sanctity of marriage so my premise had to show that.
I started out with 5
basic keys to a fiction novel.
1. CHARACTER
Your novel needs a
protagonist that readers can care about, and your character must also care
about something deeply. What does your character want, long for, need?
2. CIRCUMSTANCES
What event propels
your character out of their ho-hum life and into a story journey that will have
them either reach their goal or destroy them?
3. CONFLICT
Without conflict you
simply do not have a story. What tension, resistance, etc. will keep
your characters from attaining their goals or getting what they want?
4. CATACLYSM
That building
disaster that takes up most of the middle of your novel, and each time
your main character gets close to their goal, something pulls them back, with
worsening and worsening situations until…
5. CLIMACTIC
OUTCOME
The characters reach
a situation where the catastrophe will destroy them or they use the moral lessons
they have learned throughout the story journey to overcome the
dilemma and achieve their goal, need, desire, love interest, etc.)
For an object lesson,
I have dissected Shadowed in Silk (my first book) step-by-step
below.
1. CHARACTER:
Abby Fraser is a young but lonely married woman with a 3-year-old boy who all
her life has felt invisible to those who should have loved her.
2. CIRCUMSTANCES:
The First World War is over at last, and Abby and her son sail to India to be
reunited with her soldier husband.
3. CONFLICT:
But Abby discovers that her husband is a philandering, abusive alcoholic. To
make matters worse Abby becomes attracted to a kind Christian man who would be
shocked and dismayed if he knew how she felt about him.
4. CATACLYSM:
The political situation in India worsens, and the mistress of Abby’s husband
(along with an enemy of her husband) uses this opportunity to kidnap Abby’s
little boy, forcing Abby to choose the Christian ideals that Geoff, her godly protector, has tried to teach her.
5.
CLIMACTIC OUTCOME: Geoff goes out to the desert to rescue Abby’s son, but
so too does Abby’s husband, and in the desert, as Abby learns to lean on God
for all her needs, it is there that God decides who lives and dies, and who will be
Abby’s husband.
Now I take those 5
points, to condense them, and condense them again and again, into one strong moral premise that
will be the backbone of my novel, and something I can recite to people in 30
seconds or less.
FINAL PREMISE FOR SHADOWED IN SILK
A young
mother in the last days of the Indian Raj with an abusive husband fights a
forbidden attraction to the godly man who tries to protect her and her son,
until a dangerous upheaval forces her to choose the godly ideals of her
protector, ideals that will not only lead her away from him but also away from her
abusive husband.
Admittedly, looking
back, this premise looks very neat, but that’s because all of the major
thinking was already done. In the project I am currently writing, each of the 5
story points started out with a full page.
Working on your premise first, forces you to develop your
story arc before you even start typing your outline. TWEET THIS
The
lesson regarding Premise is one that I learned the hard way, having written my
entire debut novel with no clue what premise was. I could have shaved a few
years off the writing of that first novel if only I’d known what I know
now.
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Christine |
Love your new blog, Rachel and Christine! Great information, beautiful format. Good job!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Linda! I'm so glad you like it. Your expert opinion means a lot to us.
DeleteChristine, I loved Shadowed in Silk and you met the goal of fulfilling the moral premise. Good summary on how to lay out a book using moral premise. I plan to copy this and keep it on my desk! Keep writing!!
ReplyDeleteHi Regina, thanks so much for those kind words. And Rachel and I are delighted if we can be of a help to you.
DeleteThanks, Christine. I'm posting this on my author page.
ReplyDeleteGlad it was a help Gail.
DeleteGreat post. :) Please enter me in the drawing.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jodie. We appreciate you dropping by. And we've got you entered in the contest. We'll let you know the winner on Friday.
DeleteYay Jodie, so nice to see you entered. Lovely.
DeleteAnd the winner of the free critique is Jodie Wolfe.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Christine. What a sweet surprise. I'll be contacting you shortly.
Delete