The Premise and the Designing Principle
Finding the Gold in Your Story
A planning technique focused on extracting the true potential of an idea before writing the first scene.
What is it?
According to John Truby, nine out of ten writers fail at the premise. The premise is your story condensed into a single sentence. The designing principle is the overall strategy of the story: the internal logic that makes the parts hang together organically. It can be summarized in the equation: Story Process + Original Execution.
While the premise describes what happens, the designing principle dictates how the story develops in a unique way, organizing the narrative as a whole.
How to apply it to my short story?
- Explore possibilities (“What if?”): Do not rush to write scenes as soon as you have the idea. List all the premises you can think of, cross-reference them with your personal interests, and discover options that maximize the dramatic potential of the concept.
- Identify the single cause-and-effect pathway: Ask yourself what the hero’s basic action is throughout the story. Everything must converge into a single spine that unites all other actions.
- Define character change early: Establish how the hero’s basic beliefs will be challenged and transformed by the action, culminating in a difficult moral choice at the end.
⚠️ Common traps / What not to do
- Rushing the draft: Avoid starting to write dialogues and scenes before deeply exploring the premise. If the foundation is flawed, no amount of prose will save the story.
- Split premises: Do not create two independent paths of cause and effect in the same story (e.g., “a man falls in love AND fights his brother”). Both actions must connect into a unified line.
- Choosing the wrong character: Do not tell the story from the point of view of the “nicest” character, but rather the most fascinating, complex, and challenging one for the idea.
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