Now that we’ve had a few weeks to work on developing our characters, their external attributes, and their internal motivations and goals, it’s time to broaden our focus to the overview of our stories: the premise.

It may sound absurd that we’ve put it off this long, because premise—or what your story is about—is one of the essential elements to being able to write a complete draft of a story. Without your premise in place, how do you even know you have a story to write?

The Difference Between Genre Structure and Premise
For the story I want to write in this challenge, I have two strong characters. And I know it’s a romance novel. I know how Quin and the heroine (who still hasn’t told me her name yet) meet. I know that the bulk of the story will be the developing romantic relationship between these two characters—that there’s an instant attraction but there’s a major conflict keeping them apart. And I know they’ll eventually end up together. After all, it’s a romance novel.

So I know the basics of what happens in the story. But I don’t know the premise—I don’t know the why of the story. Why do these two fall in love with each other? Why is this new love threatened? Why should readers care if they have a happily-ever-after ending?

The Difference Between Plot and Premise
To know the premise of my story—the why—I need to have a broad view of the plot of the story. But I don’t need to know every single detail of the plot. Do I need to know some of the plot? Yes. But the individual plot points—the action beats of the story—can remain murky, or completely unknown, until I discover them while actually writing the first draft.

So while the premise is tied into the plot—or we can say it’s the basic overview of the plot—we don’t have to know every plot point of the story in order to polish our premises.

Developing Your Premise
Obviously, you’re going to start with an idea. Whether that idea comes from a character or a what if…? scenario running through your head, your mind starts building a story around that idea. Now it’s time to take your story idea to the next level and develop it into a premise.

According to Donald Maass in Writing the Breakout Novel:

Let’s explore Maass’s elements a bit so that you can determine if you have an idea or if you have a premise that will sustain your manuscript through to the end.

1. Plausibility
How many times have you sat watching a movie or TV show or reading a book and all of a sudden snorted in derision and grumbled, “Yeah, right. Like that would ever happen!”

Whether it’s too many coincidences happening at just the right time to make things work out well for the main characters or a deus ex machina element—something/someone swooping in at the last moment to solve the unsolvable crisis*—what you’ve just experienced is a lack or loss of plausibility. If a writer needs to resort to coincidences and/or deus ex machina machinations in order to get through to the end of the story, it’s likely the premise wasn’t a strong one to begin with.

*If you watch Game of Thrones, then you witnessed this in Season 5 when ***SPOILER*** Drogon suddenly appeared to save/carry off Dany to keep her from being killed by the Sons of the Harpy. I immediately said, “Dragon ex machina.”

According to Maass, not only do we need to make sure our premises are realistic—“…most readers, me included, need to feel that the story we are being presented has some basis in reality” (40)—we also don’t want them to be so realistic, so ordinary, that they become predictable. One of the reasons we turn to fiction for entertainment is to escape from normal everyday life. We don’t want everyday ordinary reality in our fiction. We want something to catch our attention by triggering our imaginations and leading us to try to imagine where a story is going. We want to explore “what if…?” We just want it to be realistic.

We don’t want a story premise that makes readers say,
“Yeah, I saw that coming.”
We want a story premise that makes readers say,
“Wow! I wish I’d written that!”

Assignment 1: Write out a brief sketch of your story idea—no more than a paragraph, maybe two. Is your premise plausible? Is it realistic without being predictable?

2. Inherent Conflict
Conflict is the driving force of fiction. Without conflict, there is no story.

As mentioned above, at this point, you don’t need to know every single conflict that will happen in your story—that’s for another stage of development when you’re actively working out your plot. Right now, all you need to do is be able to list two or three major conflicts that could happen in a story based on this premise.

Assignment 2: Write out at least three main conflicts (plot points) that you know will happen in your story. Are they deep enough to sustain the story’s momentum by creating additional sub-conflicts that will move the plot forward? Are there enough problems facing your characters to keep readers’ interest?

3. Originality
When we pitch our manuscripts to editors and agents, one of the things we’re told to do is include a list of similar titles in the proposal. Where will our story fit into the market? What already-published stories is it similar to in setting, tone, character, theme, content?

Remember the adage to write what you know? You know what? No one else has ever had the same thoughts and experiences that you have. Even if you’re an identical twin. No one else thinks or feels the exact same way you do about things. So tap into what makes you unique and bring that to your premise.

Assignment 3: What books out on the market are similar to yours in genre, subject, theme, character? How does your premise position your book in the market? Now, what makes your premise unique? Does it bring a different perspective? Different characters? Different themes? What is the mix of elements in your story’s premise that makes it stand out in a crowd?

4. Gut Emotional Appeal
The fiction we enjoy the most—no matter if it’s romance, sci-fi, true crime, sweeping family sagas, or fantasy epics—is enjoyable to us because it hits us in that sweet-spot emotionally. Perhaps you like reading tear-jerkers. Or maybe you eschew those for books that make you laugh out loud. Or maybe the type of book you pick up depends on the mood you’re in that day.

As writers, one of our primary jobs is to grab our readers by the emotions and not let go, whether it’s creating sigh-worthy heroes or horrifying scenes of death and mayhem.

Assignment 4: What are the emotional stakes in your story premise? How do you want readers to react to your story—do you want to make them laugh? cry? cringe in horror? sit on the edge of their seats? Would you want to read this story if someone else had written it?

Assignment 5: If you weren’t already working all of the above out in your Story Bible, please pause and add everything from the above assignments to a new section (Plot/Premise) in your Story Bible.

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Works Cited:

This is going to be more of a motivational post—and a “something to think about as we move forward” assignment/discussion question. But it’s something that’s very important to think about. However, I know that most of you, like me, are trying to get caught up with stuff from Week 2 and earlier this week. Please do take the time to think about and post an answer to today’s question—and then get back to working on any of the story-prep stuff you haven’t done yet.

(If you are all caught up, today would be a great day to do another brainstorming/draft-writing assignment to keep in touch and get deeper with your characters.)

Planning for Challenges and Obstacles—or, When Life Gets in the Way of Writing

Of course not!

Setting Goals = Risking Failure
Yes, by setting goals, you’re making yourself promises. You promise yourself that you are going to take this journey and that you’re going to help yourself succeed.

What Do I Do if I Need to Change My Goal?
Writing down your goals—handwritten in a journal, typed on the computer, emailed to yourself as a list, however you want to do it—makes them real. By having them written down, it gives you the opportunity not only to go back and check things off that you’ve accomplished or completed, but also to remind yourself of the other steps you promised yourself you’d be taking.

Assignment: Spend some time today thinking through possible challenges and obstacles that may come up between now and November 30 that may hinder you from meeting all of your goals. For each scenario, think through how you may handle it and how it might impact your writing time.

Then post a comment answering the question: What are you going to do when obstacles and challenges arise during this challenge?

There’s not much that can be said about setting writing goals that hasn’t already been said. In fact, I did a series on it, which you can read/re-read here.

So why don’t we go ahead and just jump into the meat of the matter.

Part 1: Setting Word-Count Goals

In order to figure out how long your manuscript needs to be, you need to know what type of manuscript you’re writing:

The daunting thing about doing a challenge like this (or like NaNo) is thinking about how many words a day we need to average to meet our goal of a completed first draft. You may only need 800 to 1,000 words a day. You may need 2,500 to 3,000 or more. Which sounds like a whole lot . . . unless you look at it more like getting in a full day’s worth of calories. You’re not (hopefully) going to eat 2,000 calories all in one meal (though, there are days . . .). In addition to breaking down your full word-count to a daily average, you can break down the words needed per day into smaller chunks to be done at designated times per day—just like meals. For example, waking up a little early to write 500 words before the day starts. Trying to get in 800 to 1,000 words at lunch, and then finishing up the rest of it in an hour or so in the evening.

Assignment 1: Determine what you want your final word-count to be for your completed first draft—or at least the word-count you’d like to reach at the end of this challenge—and post it in the comments section along with your calculation of what you’ll need to average daily to reach it and how you intend on scheduling your time to reach the daily goals.

Part 2: Tracking Your Word Count

For years, I used StoryToolz.com to keep a running meter on my word-count, both for myself and here on the blog. You’ll see that I still have a widget over on the right that links to my word-count meter for The Spymaster’s Daughter on ST. And when I clicked on it, I realized why I haven’t been thrilled with the idea of continuing to use it. Because the code that is supposed to keep the widget here on my website up-to-date isn’t working correctly (it’s most likely just a compatibility issue between WordPress and ST—so if you don’t use WordPress for your site, ST may work just finefor you). It’s time for me to find a new way to track my word-count.

If you don’t know how to set up the formulas, just ask. I’ve been doing spreadsheet formulas for over twenty years now.

Assignment 2: Determine how you will track your word-count progress and share your plan in the comments.

Part 3: Tracking Writing and Writing-Related Activities Time

Tracking your progress isn’t just about word-count. Sometimes, you may have what feels like an amazingly productive “writing day,” yet end up with very little word count to show for it. That’s where tracking the time you spend both writing and working on writing-related activities comes in.

But if you want to get even more technologically savvy, there are thousands of free time/project-tracking apps for your phone or computer or both.

Assignment 3: Decide if you want to track your writing-related time/projects and, if so, share how you intend to do so in the comments.

Sorry there was no Sunday Reflections post yesterday. I’ve been fighting a weather-triggered migraine all week, and Sunday it got the better of me and I spent most of the day in bed. I’m hoping that (and some good drugs) will help knock it out and make Week 3 of FirstDraft60 much better, and more productive, than Week 2 was for me!

Since I didn’t post yesterday, here’s the week-at-a-glance schedule for Week 3 of FD60:

#FirstDraft60 Day 16: Inspiration vs. Perspiration—Setting a Writing Schedule

Assignment 1: Read the post “Inspiration vs. Perspiration (Setting a Writing Schedule)” from FD60 2015. (Link will open it in a new tab/window.) Then come back here to complete the assignments (below).

Assignment 2: Determine what your prep-work/writing schedule will be for each day for the remainder of the challenge (today through November 30, 2016). It may be the same every day, or you may have to mix it up based on prior commitments.

Assignment 3: If don’t already have a wall calendar, print one out and hang it up. Make sure the calendar is hanging somewhere everyone in the house can see it. Write your writing schedule for every day remaining in the challenge on the calendar.

Assignment 4: Share with us what your plan is to make sure that you’re able keep to your writing schedule throughout October—you can even share a photo or link to your calendar if you’d like!

Calendar Template:
Here’s a week-at-a-glance calendar template that you can use to set your prep-work/writing schedule for the remainder of the challenge, in two versions—a printable PDF version and a customizable Excel version. (The Excel version is saved on a shared OneDrive folder—you may need to sign in with a Microsoft account to access it.)

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Work Cited:

L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1980. Print.

Saturdays throughout this challenge are going to be our days to review what we’ve covered during the week, and to catch up on anything we fell behind with.

So let’s begin.

Part 1: Review of the Week

Here are all of the assignments from this past week. Click the day of the week to open that post in a new tab/window.

Monday:

Assignment 1: Read the post “Don’t Think. Just Write.” and complete the creative vs. analytical exercise.

Assignment 2: Review the Week 1 assignments and work on anything you haven’t finished yet.

Tuesday:

Assignment: Add your characters’ physical description (using the [posted] “chart” or something of your own making) to your Story Bible. Cast your characters, if desired.

Wednesday:

Assignment: Determine your main characters’ Goals, Motivations, and Conflicts.

Thursday:

Assignment: Write out your main characters’ full backstory.

Friday:

Assignment: Read the Draft Writing vs. Regular Writing post and then complete the draft-writing assignment.

Part 2: Catch-Up, Update, and Brainstorm

Assignments for Saturday:

Above all else, have a great weekend!