Premise Statement: Heart of the Story
The premise statement can take many forms, but what it always is, is that spark at the core of a story that makes it alive and special. It stems from that initial burst of energy that you felt when you first came up with your idea – or it hit you out of nowhere (some ideas do that). Without that spark your story is hollow.
Forms it may take:
- The Truth at the heart of the story:
- “The World is Cruel”
- “All men must die”
- The Moral of the Story: “Listen to your mother when she tells you not to do something.” – Red Riding Hood
- The Argument you’re exploring: In a world filled with monsters, do you have to become a monster yourself to survive?
Unlike essay argumentation, what you argue in your story does not have to reflect reality. But it has to be true within the story world. Often the premise statement will originate with your own beliefs. If you believe the world is cruel, you will probably want to write a story that reflects that belief. And if your premise statement is “the world is cruel” then the world that you’re depicting has to show that. Important, notice the word “show” not “tell”. A character may complain about the world being cruel, but the reader wants to see some hard evidence – after all, maybe the character is just whiny. It also means that your premise statement has to be reflected in the kind of story you’re telling. In a cruel world, a character has to make cruel choices, etc.
But just hammering in that the world is cruel for 300+ pages is no fun, so you also want to explore the opposite of what you think is true. There should be kindness and selflessness questioning if that “truth” is really all there is to the world.
You can use the premise statement to shape your story’s plot, more specifically, it’s central conflict. So you want to argue that the world is cruel and to illustrate this you need a character who is most vulnerable to this kind of cruelness. Sure, it’s more fun to be the alpha predator, ideally suited to survive in such a world, but a reader’s heart (and frankly also our writer hearts) prefer the prey’s perspective. Especially if that prey, a.k.a your protagonist, doesn’t yet realize that that is what they are. So have a cruel setup of a world and a protagonist uniquely vulnerable to that world and conflict is just a formality. Now you hit the character with every manifestation of what would prove that this world is cruel and your story starts to have resonance.
When defining what your premise statement is, you want to be specific. “The world is cruel” isn’t very specific. So a more specific way to formulate the premise statement is to go like this:
Character + Conflict = Result
“In a cruel world, those unwilling to fight back and kill will not only die but also endanger everyone they care about.” – (Tokyo Ghoul)
We mentioned before that you should also explore the opposite of what your premise statement believes. This is where characters and their specific arcs come into play. An easy way to explore more than one truth, and also challenge that truth, is to have a character who learns the opposite lesson of what your protagonist learns for instance. Where every character has a personal premise statement. The best stories don’t just shove one truth down the reader’s throat but use their characters to show the pros and cons, the struggle that comes with that.
In Tokyo Ghoul the premise statement is that the world is cruel and if you want to stay alive sometimes you have to fight, even if that means hurting others. Kaneki’s premise statement is exactly that. Touka’s, however, is not. Touka is a Ghoul who already lives by the premise statement. So by contrast her journey has her realize that fighting only leads to pain and destruction and that her own actions contribute to that vicious circle. And through that contrast, and many more throughout the manga, the premise statement is actually more in line with: The world is cruel if you believe that it is and give in to it.
When you’re first starting out with an idea, it can be overwhelming or even counter-intuitive to formulate a premise statement. You’ve just met your characters and the story as such, after all, you don’t want to start hyper analyzing and constructing before you know who they are. But that’s the great thing with storytelling, isn’t it? We get to make up our own rules of how we go about it. I’ve found that when I try to be all smart about what the premise statement at the heart of my stories is, it is more limiting than helpful. Like trying to exactly define who you as a person are, takes away your freedom to change your mind about who you want to be. But at the same time, my process does involve getting very clear on what truth I want to explore at the heart of each story. As I said, it’s a spark, that initial feeling that comes with an idea. And I find that once I can put that into words, not by forcing it but by looking for it and then stating it as a premise statement, it helps me make decisions about what the story is.