PREMISE = PROMISE

A PREMISE IS A PROMISE

What exactly is a premise? 

A premise is something asserted to be true that the story you are writing will prove. In other words, a premise is "a proposition hypothetically supposed or held to be true; a basis of argument.” A premise is a proposition. The story is the evidence that supports the proposition.

So why is it so difficult for some of us to nail down a premise?

It's probably because we really don't know what we're writing about until we're into this unwieldy draft a dozen times. Also, we must dig deeper than the surface of the story and that means delving into our own presuppositions and getting to know ourselves better. If we have a conviction about the nature of human reality and that is something we believe to be true, one of the premises we hold, and we incorporate this into the story, the novel will take on new dimensions and have more universal appeal.

A premise is a promise. 

Here's an idea: Great love can defy even death. 

This promises a Romeo and Juliet type story, doesn't it?

A premise deals with universals—love, courage, responsibility, greed, freedom, justice, death, honesty, duty—and includes the fulfillment of the issue that's at the heart of the story.  The fulfillment in the R and J premise is the lovers will sacrifice their lives to be together after death.

For example, maybe we believe that a big city cop is going to be completely out of his element when he's called to a small beach town after an shark catastrophe.

Okay, if that's what we believe to be true, then here's one premise we might come up with for our story:

When a fish-out-of-water, big-city cop moves to a small, coastal town dependent on tourism, he must team with an oceanographer and a crusty sailor to convince the doubting, money-grubbing townsfolk to close their beaches because a giant, man-eating shark is lurking just offshore, until the shark strikes, forcing the townsfolk to allow the cop and his buddies to take on the shark mano-a-mano.

Sound familiar? Back copy for a book? Hype for a popular film?

JAWS?

Here's a shorter version:
When a great white shark starts attacking beachgoers in a coastal town during high tourist season, a water-phobic sheriff must assemble a team to hunt it down before it kills again.

If the story proves the premise, then it has succeeded in fulfilling its promise to the reader.

The act of creating a story premise is an act of clarification. It's an opportunity to explore and make clear to yourself and your readers a conviction or value you hold to be true. By focusing on the story premise, we can discover the story that is aching to be told.

Keep in mind that a good premise is a thumbnail synopsis of the idea behind the story. Therefore, it must contain the central theme or dramatic issue, the action or conflict, and the fulfillment of the idea or value.

And what am I doing at the moment? I'm working on my own story premise for CHANGED IN THE NIGHT. 

I have to put my money where my mouth is, right? We're discussing premise in my writing classes. I already have several versions. The more I refine the premise, the more I clarify the story for myself and for my readers. This really helps in final revision, in querying agents and publishers, and in enticing readers.

What's your book about? 

Work on the premise and find out. You'll learn a lot about your story and about yourself as well.

REVISE WITH A POET'S EYE

Poetry is painting with words and is a personal, creative art form that uses imagery and metaphor. Shakespeare's stories are resplendent with metaphors. Take a look at Romeo and Juliet with Romeo referring to Juliet as "the sun" or Sonnet 18 with the words: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day, and you'll see all forms of metaphor.

Elements used in poetry can also be used in our own writing. Poetry has subtext, simile, and metaphor; so should good prose.  One of the tricks Ray Bradbury uses is elevating his writing by taking something simple and transforming it into something beautiful through the use of metaphors.

Poetry uses symbols, theme, and motifs.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien nearly takes my breath away with prose that often reads like poetry.

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

The "things" that O’Brien’s characters carry during war are literal and figurative. While the soldiers carry heavy physical loads, they also carry emotional things, such as, terror, love, and grief. Each man’s physical burden underscores his emotional burden. Faced with the heavy burden of fear, the men of Alpha Company also carry the weight of their reputations and showing fear can reveal vulnerability to the enemy, fellow soldiers, and themselves.

In revising our prose, we need to strive for such excellence in word choice, deftly including literary elements seen in poetry:  symbols, theme, motifs and metaphor. Then we can kick our fiction writing up a notch from that SFD to something of merit.

PUT A POEM IN YOUR POCKET

April is National Poetry Month and April 30th is "poem in your pocket" day. In celebration, I am sharing a special poem written by Ted Kooser that I pull out and use every year. You might like to share it with others.

POCKET POEM 
by Ted Kooser

If this comes creased and creased again and soiled

as if I’d opened it a thousand times

to see if what I’d written here was right,

it’s all because I looked too long for you

to put in your pocket. Midnight says

the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped

by nervous fingers. What I wanted this

to say was that I want to be so close

that when you find it, it is warm from me.

IT'S NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that poetry is "what will and must be spoken."

April is National Poetry Month, and I celebrate by hosting community poetry events and revisiting poetry in my writing classes.

Edward Hirsch, poetry editor of DoubleTake magazine and author of four volumes of poetry, including "Wild Gratitude" and "Earthly Measures," has some of my favorite thoughts about poetry:

"Read a poem to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read it while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read it when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say it over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture—the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us—has momentarily stopped. This poem has come from a great distance to find you."

Reading a poem is an intimate and solitary experience that should be treasured.  Once a poem is understood, it evolves to live inside the reader. Reading a poem demands we pay attention and concentrate in an era when we're inattentive and distracted by the busyness of our days. As Hirsh suggests, "poetry is a solitary, intimate and passionately private communication of a soul to another soul."

When I taught middle school, I told my fourteen-year-old boy students that the best way to get a girl's attention was to read her a poem; better yet, write her one. These boys did, and so did the girls, and we formed the Society of Poets. We read poems in a coffeehouse setting in the classroom on Fridays. The weekly event brought appreciation for each other as well as sighs and tears and even the local press. To belong to this elite group, students had to write 100 poems. Thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen-year-old kids dug deep to find ways to express what had before been inexpressible, feelings about love, insecurity, depression, fear, and war.

As Hirsch said, "The great individual poem is the message salvaged from a shipwreck and sealed in the bottle. Take the time to go down to the dunes and search for that bottle. When you find it, bring it home because it is now yours. This haunted and haunting message was meant for you."

Celebrate National Poetry Month! Join us Thursday, April 16th from 1-3 at Sea Country Center in Laguna Niguel, 949-425-5151, and hear five of my favorite performance poets: John Gardiner, Ricki Mandeville, Michael Sprake, Ellyn Maybe, and Kate Buckley.  They will increase your appreciation of the spoken word.

THE TRUTH ABOUT STORY

Some of the best stories come from real life because they are dense and compelling. That's why readers often favor memoir, as well as, fiction that allows them to identify with the protagonist or point of view (POV) narrator.

When I lived in Arctic Iñupiat villages without any plumbing or roads or modern conveniences like television, computer, or the Internet.  I acquired a lot of first hand rugged experiences and survival skills that I included in my books I AM THE ICE WORM, DOG WOMAN, ALONE IN THE ICE WORLD, and FINDING JADE MOUNTAIN.

Fishing commercially for salmon along the California coast aboard a 55' sailing schooner taught me other life lessons I included to BELLY UP. My sailboat Bobolink became the sailboat in the story and my experiences with sharks, whales, freighters and trying to catch fish in terrible weather gave me the nuts and bolts I needed to give the story verisimilitude.

I taught eighth grade on a USMC base and former students who have read WARRIOR'S DAUGHTER say it's like "reliving eighth grade all over again."

Both KNUCKLE DOWN and LOOKING OUT FOR LINDY are based on the Los Angeles homefront during World War II and the sinking of my dad's liberty ship SS Peter Silvester by a German submarine in the Indian Ocean.

SS Peter Silveste

A FEW SCREWS LOOSE has truths about friendship and mental illness. And my current work-in-progress CHANGED IN THE NIGHT (working title) deals with psychological issues connected with loss within a context of sci-fi/fantasy.

The most important element of story is truth, and truth comes from reaching into those deep and sometimes brutal feelings. Readers tune in to that truth at a level they might not understand. All they know is they've been there and done that and can relate to the story's narrator.

As writers, we need to excavate human emotions even if it hurts to face our own guilt, fears, and hopes. We need to somehow get those feelings onto the page for the reader no matter what genre we are working in.

How do we get story? The hard way; we dig up a rough draft like clay and slap it down on paper. Then we mold that sloppy mess and shape it and tweak it and revise it a hundred times. We put our heart and soul into it so there are universal truths based on who we are, what we know, experiences we've had, and life lessons we've learned.

Readers read books to discover how to lead their own lives.

Where do stories come from? The truth is they come from ourselves; therefore, we must dig deep.

TRUE GRIT

Writing is hard work.

After 12 books published and a dozen more mediocre attempts dwelling in storage boxes, in notebooks, or on floppy discs somewhere, I think the key to achieving a goal as a writer is perhaps simpler than we think. I have to remind myself during my final revisions on Changed in the Night that this kind of work is not supposed to be easy. It never was easy before, after all, and my latest book is complicated beyond belief.

Sometimes revision can get overwhelming. That's when I remember that this is an endurance race and persistence pays off. It seems to me that authors who succeed have one trait in common: TRUE GRIT.

GRIT is perseverance and passion for long-term goals. While ability is extremely important, GRIT is the characteristic of high-achieving individuals that sets them apart. Such individuals are able to maintain their determination and motivation over extended periods of time in spite of adversity and failure. These writers are committed over the long haul and are passionate enough to maintain the course until the goal is reached in spite of setbacks and challenges.

GRIT is being resilient in spite of rejection, negative feedback, and less than glowing critiques. GRIT is persevering through the "shitty first draft" and then the following draft and the dozen or so drafts after that. Having GRIT helps us do good work over and over again even if it takes years.

Here are some examples of GRIT that inspire me:

Carrie by Stephen King got thrown into the trash after 30 rejections. King's wife rescued the manuscript, and it was sent out again to become a classic in the horror genre.

Dune by Frank Herbert was turned down 33 times before becoming an extremely popular science fiction novel.

Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen was submitted 140 times before becoming a multi-million dollar bestseller.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig was rejected 121 times before it found fans as a much sought after book for its many life lessons.

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was rejected 38 times before it wound up in print and then a must-see movie with a gritty heroine named Scarlett O'Hara.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle collected 26 rejections before becoming a best-selling children's book.

These are only some of the stories that help me stay the course. 

Without GRIT we don't win the marathon or circumnavigate the earth or write a great novel. When I get bogged down and want to chuck it all to simply clean out the closet, it helps to remember the tenacious GRIT of others. 

OUR WRITER'S JOURNEY

Throughout life, we often ask ourselves these questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my life's purpose?

Whether we like it or not, we're on a compelling journey just as any protagonist in a work of fiction. Even as we sit doing nothing, we're traveling upon a spinning blue ball around the sun. We're not alone in this particular endeavor, since we're interconnected in so many ways, global citizens existing on a miraculous planet where whatever we say or do affects all living beings.  

As Chief Seattle once proclaimed:

Whatever befalls the earth

Befalls the sons and daughters of earth.

We did not weave the web of life.

We are merely a strand in it.

Whatever we do to the web,

We do to ourselves.

My POV narrator in CHANGED IN THE NIGHT accidentally kills her twin brother on December 7, 1941, and this affects all of humanity. Of course, that's not the only incident on the "day that will live in infamy;" and like events in my story, the cause and effect of everything we've done or ever will do eventually leads to either our ultimate destruction or harmony and peace. 

According to Deepak Chopra, all the intelligence of the universe is really inside us. How empowering is that? The way to establish a connection with this source is through contemplation, meditation, and introspection. 

Many in my journaling workshops are attempting to do just that, to reflect and find a higher ground. Journal writing, after all, can be a form of meditation and provide inner awareness and clarity. 

We need to discover our passion, what we love and are really good at, and do it. It's our fellow travelers who will help us recognize our talents and skills; they act as messengers in our self-discovery. They see us and recognize our potential just as we see them and offer support.

We meet many obstacles along the way, just as our fictional characters do, and how we meet those challenges reveals and shapes us. We should heed each synchronicity since these serendipitous occurrences help clarify our purpose and guide us toward achieving our true potential. 

We're told to follow our bliss or seek our passion. If that creative passion is writing, then we surely must understand our protagonist's, as well as, our own journey. One responsibility as an author is to offer universal truths through story. 

We can only do this through arduous and often tedious work. It takes courage to delve inside our innermost selves, wisdom to create a powerful arrangement of words, and a deep compassion for our fellow travelers in order to become a vital part of this interconnectedness on Earth and contribute in a powerful and meaningful way.