What Is a Story Premise and Why Should You Care?

If a story is going to fail, it will first do so at the premise level, i.e., at the level of the idea itself.

The “7-Step Premise Development Process” is all about developing your story’s premise. This is what you are going to learn how to do, step by step in part two of this book. But, do you even know what a story premise is? Is it the same as a log line? Is a story premise all about your characters, or should it focus on plot? Or is story premise a pitch tool that you only use when you’re pitching your movie idea to a potential producer at the annual pitchfest?

Common Definitions of Story Premise

Certainly the above questions are common ones asked in today’s screenwriting world, because all of them have been used to define a story premise. Could they all be right? If I’ve learned anything in my years of working with screenwriters, producers, and novelists, I have learned that just because people use the same words doesn’t mean they are speaking the same language. Nothing illustrates this vocabulary-language disconnect better then when I ask a room full of screenwriters to define a story premise. Invariably, I get as many definitions as there are writers in the room. Consider some of the more popular definitions screenwriters use for defining story premise:

• It’s a log line.
• It’s your story’s hook.
• It’s the theme of your story.
• It’s a pitch line.
• It’s the underlying idea of your story.
• It’s the concept that drives the plot.
• It’s the story of your main character’s journey.

None of these really define the term “story premise,” or clarify the true nature of a story premise. They are more akin to clichés than useful definitions. They hold no practical information or utility that a screenwriter can rely on in developing a story, and that is because none of the common definitions of story premise allow for its use as a story development tool. A premise might help you sell your idea to someone, or define some discrete aspect of your story (character, theme, or plot), but story premise is never considered an all-around tool for actual story development. This is why none of the “default” answers to the question “What is a story premise?” can be taken seriously and why this is something you should care about as a writer. You should care because as long as you buy into the consensus responses, you deny yourself one of the most powerful tools in the screenwriter’s toolbox: the premise line.

It is ironic that much of today’s screenwriting trade (not all) has developed such a disconnect between what a story premise really is and how the consensus defines it. This is ironic because historically even the ancients were closer to understanding story premise than most contemporary scriptwriters.

Historical Definitions of Story Premise

Story premise, as a concept and as a literal thing, was not an invention of the 18th, 19th, 20th, or even the 21st centuries. Indeed, the beginnings of story premise go back much further into our collective narrative past. The Greeks first sowed the seeds of story premise more than 3,500 years ago, with Aristotle’s (384 BC–322 BC) seminal work The Poetics,¹ in which he addressed the idea of “unity of action,” recognizing that:

For more than 35 centuries, the principal truth underlying Aristotle’s idea of “organic unity” has been examined, theorized, and refined by many narrative theorists. After all, if the essence of this idea could be harnessed, then all storytellers would have an invaluable tool that could help them decide what narrative elements should, or should not, constitute any story.

The search for clarity would take a giant’s step with Gustav Freytag, the renowned 19th century German novelist and playwright. Freytag, famous for his five-stage (act) theory of dramatic structure, presented an intuitive proposition called the “Idea of the Drama,” which came tantalizingly close to a workable proposition for the principle of “organic unity”:²

As we will see, the structure produced is not generated from the “crystallization” Freytag describes, but rather it’s the other way around; it is the structure of the story itself that makes possible all of what he describes. The “Idea of the Drama” may be the first cohesive and grounded proposition in modern dramatic theory that gives a basis for any contemporary definition of story premise.

It would be Lajos Egri, the Hungarian-born playwright and creative writing instructor, who in his influential work The Art of Dramatic Writing (originally published in 1946) put forth the idea that well-motivated and defined characters gave rise to plot, and not the other way around. Egri’s building upon Freytag’s “Idea of the Drama” was a significant stepping-stone for the further evolution of our modern concept of a story premise, and he became even so bold as to define the pieces of dramatic structure needed to form a functioning premise idea:

Almost everyone who teaches screenwriting today identifies these same three “parts” in any premise construction. They may change the terminology a bit, but any current premise construct, by knowledgeable teachers or screenwriters, sources from Egri’s writings. The concept is the same: a premise has three parts: character, conflict, and an ending. If you can convey the sense of a character in conflict that is working toward some conclusion, then you have the basis for a premise to a story.

Following Egri’s lead, we are certainly better off than following the creative writing consensus mentioned earlier. With Egri, at least, we’re not talking in sound bites and clichés. But we still don’t have a functional explanation for story premise that captures the full utility and power of the concept.

A Working Definition of Story Premise

Think of a story premise as being like the banks of a river. When there are no banks to form the flow of water, what does water do? It does what comes naturally: it takes the form of its container—this is one of the defining characteristics of any fluid. Without banks, the container is space itself, so the water fills the space. We recognize this as a flood. Now, make the water your writing process. Without guides, without form, without direction, your process will flood and act just like any fluid thing; it will fill the space. And before you know it, you will be lost in the flood plain wondering how to get back to solid ground. Story premise, and its tool the premise line, acts like the banks of a river to guide, not control; to harness, not to contain your writing process. But more, together (story premise and premise line) they constitute your canary in the coal mine warning you when you are about to go off into the story flood plain. They can keep you going in a solid direction, allowing you to safely run off in “crazy” story tangents when the muse hits, but always giving you a clear path back to dry land.

A story premise is a container that holds your story’s right, true, and natural structure.

So, if a story premise is a container (river banks) that holds your story (the river), what exactly does that mean? What is really being “held”? A story premise holds the very structure of your story and thus acts as a guide and conduit to support the entire storytelling process. Rather than just three parts (character, conflict, and ending), story premise is made up of seven parts: character, constriction, desire, relationship, resistance, adventure, and change.

Those seven parts constitute one of the most important and mysterious creatures in the storytelling universe: the Invisible Structure. Important because every story has an Invisible Structure; mysterious because while crafted by you the writer, it is more akin to a force of nature than a human invention. And like a force of nature, it can overpower us in our writing process, or it can work with us co-creatively to reveal the marvel of a fully formed story.

Consider how every writer writes a story. As we write, we all make choices to include one thing at the exclusion of something else. As soon as one thing is chosen, countless other things will not be chosen by default, thus eliminating thousands of other potential story lines from coming into existence. We narrow, constrict, limit the story window with every choice we make. And yet, creativity is not stifled, ingenuity flourishes, and invention cannot be stopped. Choice frees us; it does not imprison us. And why do we make the choices we make? You could have a character walk through the door or not walk through the door. Which one will you choose? You will choose the one that “works.” You will be attracted to one or the other choice: door, or no door. Why? Because, while you are the architect, the structure is already there embedded in the choices you choose to pay attention to. You as a writer have unlimited possibilities when you start a story, you cannot entertain them all—you will never get anything done if you do. So, you listen, you focus, you follow your instincts to make one story choice over another. The structure that guides this process is the Invisible Structure—there, but unseen—until you choose. The seven components of the Invisible Structure are the seven common springs that feed the story river upon which we all sail our boats. They are the headwaters that help you, me, every writer make the story choices that “work.”

Watery metaphors aside, helping to make the “right choice,” and revealing the embedded structure every story possesses, are two of the central tasks of the “7-Step Premise Development Process.” But to fully understand how this works, and the role you play as the creating force, a deeper understanding must be had of the Invisible Structure. And for that to happen, we need a separate chapter.