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How To Write The Premise

A theme or premise is an idea about life and its meaning.  You need to go deep into the narrative and find a thought that will illuminate our view of the world.  It should spring from your view of the way the world is and your moral sense of the way the world should be.

95% of writers fail in the premise.  You may come up with a great idea for a movie, but if you don't develop it the right way, the best scene writing in the world won't make a difference.

The function of the premise isn’t just to define the moral of the story but to give you the purpose of your plot.  The premise helps you in the early stages to develop the story and to understand the scope of change during the course of the narrative itself.

Exploring your premise has to do with discovering the deepest question your hero has to confront in playing out the drama.  How your hero answers this deep question is the real stakes of the story; it's what makes the audience want to watch this character struggle and win all the way to the end.

One problem every writer has in forming their premise is choosing a silly one that is totally improbable and causes unintended laughter in an effort to be unique.  This is why the majority of Australian films fail at the box office.  The writer may have written a perfectly dramatic story or a light drama, but when it gets shown at the cinema the audience is rolling on the floor laughing.

Another problem is that it has a limited premise.  This means that it doesn’t expand past the logline.  This is what happened with Little Fish.  The logline was great and it meant to show drug addicts dealing with their addiction and the lack of promise it gives to their lives.  But this wasn’t evident in the film.  It seemed to have no theme whatsoever and just show dumb people going through their boring, often stupid events of their lives.  The fact that the writer/director wasn’t taught how to write made matters much worse.

Then we have the offensive Premise.  If you have some scene or basic idea that is offensive to someone, get rid of it.  It won’t be read.  Keep in mind that the story should show a way out, not just show live as a garbage can.  Your sequence or story should not be designed to abuse people.

Another problem Australian writers have is that they frequently come up with a premise that the audience can’t identify with.  Extremely few people are drug addicts or homosexuals and the audience isn’t interested in these sorts of films because it’s not 99.9% of the audience’s world.  The audience needs to have some reality on what’s going on and the people and organizations involved in the story.  Don’t make a character do something that is too unique or weird.

Your premise should encapsulate what your story is about, giving a sense of the main character and give a sense of the outcome of the story.  You have cut out a lot of possibilities, because if your premise line is bad there is nothing you can do to make the story work.  Make sure your story idea is worth writing about before you actually start writing it.  Make sure your storyline is unique enough to interest other people, not just you.

Get a sense of the central conflict.  Unlike The Castle, your story should have both a hero and a person who is trying to stop your hero from reaching their goal.  The central conflict in any story is what the two central characters are fighting about.

The theme of a story (sometimes known as the premise) is what your script is about on a deeper level than the actual story.  The plot of any film, reduced to one brief statement, is called the premise.  By dictionary definition it is: a proposition stated or assumed as leading to a conclusion.  If a script editor is asked to sum up Macbeth, he might have said ‘ambition’.  Or he might have expanded it slightly and said, “Ruthless ambition drives people to their own destruction”.  The premise for Little Red Riding Hood could be “Wolves should make sure there are no woodcutters around before dressing in drag”.  Or alternatively, “Little girls should have their eyes tested before visiting their grandmothers”.

Screenplays need to contain thoughts and ideas over and above the bricks and mortar of the actual story they tell.  Producers know that Othello is more than jealousy consuming a man so much that he destroys the one he loves.  When they read your script, they need to convince themselves that your story has something to tell us about life today, or about human nature.