Novel Idea to Premise

by Ron Estrada

Your Big Idea

You wake up at 1 am and say “Aha! I’ve got an idea!” Though your spouse is probably annoyed with you, you’re thrilled. You reach for your handy journal on your nightstand and write something like “A young girl meets her true love on Ellis Island.” You smile at your brilliance and drift back to sleep (though your spouse will probably be staring at the ceiling for a couple more hours).

The next day you look at your journal and say, “Um…okay…big deal.”

As well you should. Your idea is nothing new. Ideas rarely are. What you have is just a tickling of a what must become a concept if you were to move forward. So you pour a cup of coffee and plop down at the kitchen table to think about this latest interruption to your sleep. You may decide it’s been done. Or you just can’t see how to make a story out of it. Chances are, though, if you’re any kind of writer, you can take any idea and bump it to the next level.

Concept

The concept is what you’re shooting for. Maybe by the time you hit bottom on your second cuppa, you’ll have something like this scratched out: A young Jewish girl travels across Europe and on to America during the 1930s, where she meets a man who turns out to be a German officer and falls in love.

Now we’re getting somewhere. See the difference, though? A novice writer may have starting typing away at the idea stage. Your young lass would have gotten to the U.S. and fallen in love, then…so what? But now you have something we can sink our teeth into. Everyone reading the jacket cover on this one knows trouble is afoot.

But we’re not there yet. Before you type “Chapter One,” we still need the final jacket copy (or something close).

Premise

Premise is, essentially, concept with a character thrown in. Let’s assume this is a Romance. So we know now that the two have to end up HEA (happily ever after for you suspense types…yes, alive). And it’s obvious from the concept that you feverishly pounded out that this will be no easy journey. But let’s dig deeper. We don’t want “difficult.” We want “NO WAY.”

So what would be the worst possible soul mate for our German officer. Yeah…let’s do that. Our heroine is a Polish Jew. No, not good enough. How about a Polish Jew whose family was forced out of Russia, her father brutally murdered, her brother imprisoned (nice set up for book 2, eh?). She’s coming to America to escape the Holocaust she sees coming. Her mother gave her every penny they had so one of her children could survive.

And what of our German officer? Not just any German officer, but a man notorious for his persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany. He’s in America as a spy, to seek support from anti-semites and put political pressure on Roosevelt to stay out of the war.

Not bad. We have a lot of gaps to fill in, but I think we can come up with a first stab at a premise. How does this sound:

A young Jewish nurse escapes Poland in 1936 to flee to America, where a handsome gunshot victim stumbles into the clinic where she’s working. Little does she know that the young man is a German spy sent to the U.S. to stir anti-Semitic sentiment. He can’t take her home and she can’t keep him in America. Will their love survive the Holocaust, a war, and deep hurts that span generations?

It needs work, but not too shabby for a suspense writer with a few minutes of free time. The key to moving from Idea to Concept to Premise is to continually ratchet up the stakes and the conflict. Tension (remember tension, your best friend?) will flow naturally out of that potent mixture.

If you can’t get past the Idea or the Concept state, you may need to go back to the blank page and shoot for something new. Start with an interesting setting, time period, character, whatever it takes to inspire you, and go from there. But even the purest of pansters among you should never hit the keyboard until that premise is on paper and you find it intriguing (if you don’t, why would your reader?). You can tweak it as you go, maybe even make major changes, but if you start with a premise that will make a good story, you can only move up from there.

How about you? Ever had a “great” idea that just didn’t pan out? Ever had a so-so idea that turned out to be a great concept or premise?