This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the helping writers become authors podcast.

I hope you enjoy this week's episode,

The only reason your story's premise is important.

Your story's premise is the foundation of your work.

This is true for the shaping of the story itself and it is also true from a marketing perspective.

For both writers and readers, the premise is the reason

we become interested in a story. Even when you don't know your premise until late in the discovery process, whether that's outlining or drafting,

the premise is still the heart of it all, beating in the background, waiting for you to follow the sound and discover what it's all about.

Writers often put a lot of pressure on themselves to identify and polish their premises. This is both because stripping a story down to the

bare bones of a one or two sentence premise is valuable for crafting a

cohesive and resonant structure,

and also because the premise sentence is often considered one of the key ways

of advertising a story and getting people to buy it and read it.

As a result, it can be rather easy to put too much emphasis on the premise itself.

After all, it's just one or two sentences. A brilliant premise is no guarantee of a good story.

As Matt Bird points out in his book, The Secrets of Story, audiences purchase your work because of your concept, but

they embrace it because of your characters.

As a matter of fact, I've personally found myself increasingly jaded about good premises, and by this I particularly mean flashy and high concept premises.

When browsing for new reading or viewing material, I often find myself thinking,

yeah, yeah, that sounds awesome, but is there any substance?

spoiler as often as not, the answer is no.

And yet it remains that the premise is a crucial tool in any storytellers kit, as long as you understand its purpose and don't over emphasize its importance in the larger

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