Want to write novels that feel real enough to the reader to have been ripped from the headlines, whatever your genre? Think like a journalist. Just like a journalist, as a fiction writer, you will need to define WHAT your story is about. For the novelist WHAT relates to premise.

Get ready to explore the concept of premise. Those people in your head, desperate to be part of a story? They need something to do. It’s the all-important WHAT that your story is about. To stay on track, you need a keystone to hold onto, so you don’t get lost in all the things your story COULD be. Premise is your keystone, and it works like the legend for a road map.

In this textbook/workbook you will look at what you plan to write about from different angles and will use the information you uncover to create a story premise that has an active protagonist in an intriguing story, fighting for high stakes. (These can include both external stakes and emotional stakes).

This workbook serves as a full self-paced writing course, presenting theory on writing an effective premise - and then offering step-by-step worksheets that allow you to apply what you just learned to your own story. The instructional material is designed to give you a basic foundation in creative writing theory regarding clearly defining your story’s concept, conflicts and plot question to create fiction with meaning using the information you add into the worksheets.

Working through the entire WHAT Relates to Premiseb workbook will give you a sound thesis statement for the concepts and themes your novel will explore, and define other parameters you can pull from while writing. In short, you get a reference source for your world - and the expertise on how to use it.

Approach refining premise the same way a journalist approaches a news story.

Delve into understanding how to build a powerful premise and how to make sure your story is sound and will add up to something in which your specific characters overcome one specific problem or person in order to become a better or worse person. Instructional material focuses on building genuine conflict into your story, understanding clear goals and motivations for character action, and making sure that your stakes are high enough. All of this works in tandem with the worksheets.

Write out your premise to define the heart of what your story is about, and what is at stake in it. Determine what you want to write about, and consider why. Boil that down into a concept. Uncover literary devices that you could use to support your premise.

NOTE: The e-book version of this workbook links to printable versions of the worksheets. The page count is therefore different than the print book.

Hemmingway worked as a newspaper journalist before he became a fiction writer. E.B. White did a stint at the New Yorker. L.M. Montgomery was a reporter in Halifax before tackling Anne of Green Gables. Margaret Mitchell got her start as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. What these writers have in common: an excellent sense of character, and the ability to write clean prose that clearly puts forwards the characters’ goals and motivations. This ability may well come from having mastered the journalistic art, which emphasizes creating a sound story that balances logic, research and emotional authenticity.

Even if you’re working in a purely creative world, you can still use those principles, and learn to organize and research like a journalist, and to ask the questions a journalist asks either before or after you write your story.