It came to you in the shower, or waiting for the bus, or at three in the morning, which is when these things like to show up. An idea. Someone steals the dragon egg that a town has kept on display in its square for centuries. And you thought: there’s a novel in this.
There might be. But it helps to know one thing before you go on: an idea isn’t a novel, the same way a seed isn’t a tomato. It needs soil, water, time and the occasional chat with the plant. The good news is that all of that can be learned.
What an idea has (and what it’s missing)
An idea is usually an image or a situation. A town, a dragon egg, an empty glass case. It’s the hook, the thing that tickles you. That’s great, and it’s yours.
What it almost never comes with is this:
- Someone who wants something. Not “someone in the town”, but Mara, the new librarian, who wants to find the egg before the festival because she’s the prime suspect.
- Something that makes it hard. A police officer determined to arrest her, a mayor in a hurry to close the case and a whole town that tells “the new one” nothing.
- Something at stake. If she doesn’t find the egg, what does she lose? If she does, what does she find out?
- An ending, even a temporary one. It doesn’t need to be tied up, but you should know roughly where you’re heading. You can drive without a destination. You just burn a lot of gas.
Once the idea has those four things, it stops being a pretty picture and starts being a story.
From 2% to 10%: the premise
The next step has a name: the premise. It’s your novel told in one sentence. Not the blurb on the back cover, but the pocket version. The one you’d tell someone in an elevator that’s only going up two floors.
For Wanted: One Dragon, Sunday Plot’s sample novel, it would be something like this:
When someone steals the dragon egg that the town of Valdrago has kept on display for three hundred years, Mara, the out-of-town librarian and prime suspect, has six days to find it before the festival, and the only person who can help her is the police officer determined to arrest her.
Look at what’s in there: who (Mara), what she wants (to find the egg), what gets in the way (being the suspect, the police officer) and what’s at stake (her name and, though she doesn’t know it yet, her place in the town). It’s long, yes. That’s fine. A premise isn’t a slogan.
Writing it can make you a little dizzy, because it forces you to decide. A trick: write a bad version on purpose. Then a slightly less bad one. By the third, you usually get something that sounds like you.
You don’t need to know everything today
This is where a lot of people get overwhelmed. They have an idea, try to think through the whole novel in one go, and their head fills up with characters, scenes and possible endings, all at once and all shouting. So they drop it.
You don’t have to do that. A novel gets planned the same way it gets written: one piece at a time. Today, the premise. Another day, who your protagonist is. Another, how it ends. If a question doesn’t have an answer yet, park it and come back later. “I don’t know yet” is a perfectly respectable answer.
A novel gets planned one piece at a time
- Idea 2%
- Premise 10% ← Today
- Protagonist
- Structure
- Scenes
- Writing
What if my idea has already been written?
Spoiler: nearly all of them have. There are thousands of novels about someone who arrives in a town where everybody knows everybody, and there will be more. What hasn’t been written is your version: your characters, your obsessions, the way you look at a village square. The idea is the excuse. The novel is you.
For today
If you only do one thing, make it this: write your premise in one sentence. Ugly, long, temporary, it doesn’t matter. It’s the first brick, and ugly bricks hold up walls too.
In Sunday Plot, it’s the first thing guided mode asks you. Ten minutes, one text box, and you’ve gone from 2% to 10%. Not bad for a Tuesday.