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odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Premise
The premises of a story are what readers accept on faith in order for the story to begin.
Readers are willing to believe in the world you present even if it violates their sense of reality. So a story may start:
More prosaic premises still need to be established with authority. A story can be based on the premise that a married woman has an affair with a minister or on the premise that a restless young man signs up for a job on a whaling ship with a strange crew. The premise is the germ from which the story grows.
There is also a premise in the choice of literary genre. A story that presents itself as a realistic depiction of a single mother trying to raise her talented son in a bigoted rural town violates its realistic premises if it resolves its problems by revealing at the end that the child is the secret clone of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
There is also the premise of the narrator. If your narrator starts
You can change premises, but it's risky business. If you add new premises, ones that do not grow out of the original premise, readers become suspicious.
There's no clear rule to separate a story that's delightfully imaginative from one that is merely unbelievable. There's no clear rule, except that what works, works. You can make readers fetch, but not too far.
See Beginnings, Narrator, Suspension of Disbelief.
Premise
The premises of a story are what readers accept on faith in order for the story to begin.
Readers are willing to believe in the world you present even if it violates their sense of reality. So a story may start:
In a small village in Romania there is a family of three-eyed gypsies. They never travel, for in the past they have been viciously persecuted and even killed by the fearful, ignorant peasants of the region.The more assuredly you establish the premise, the more inclined your readers are to believe it and to enter your world with curiosity. You can tell them that it is A.D. 3000 and the world is run by penguins. You can tell them it is 30,000 B.C. and humans and animals speak freely with one another, often arguing about the meaning of life. Readers are willing to say, "All right. I believe it. So tell me the story."
More prosaic premises still need to be established with authority. A story can be based on the premise that a married woman has an affair with a minister or on the premise that a restless young man signs up for a job on a whaling ship with a strange crew. The premise is the germ from which the story grows.
There is also a premise in the choice of literary genre. A story that presents itself as a realistic depiction of a single mother trying to raise her talented son in a bigoted rural town violates its realistic premises if it resolves its problems by revealing at the end that the child is the secret clone of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
There is also the premise of the narrator. If your narrator starts
Marika and Joven hated each other with the delicious hate of tart lemonade,you've implicitly established an omniscient narrator who might tell what Marika and Joven are thinking and who will comment on them freely. Whatever the narrative voice, the prose style you choose to start with -- whether colloquial, lyrical, learned, or neutral -- is part of the stylistic premise of the story. Or if you start with alternating voices, that's another kind of premise.
You can change premises, but it's risky business. If you add new premises, ones that do not grow out of the original premise, readers become suspicious.
There's no clear rule to separate a story that's delightfully imaginative from one that is merely unbelievable. There's no clear rule, except that what works, works. You can make readers fetch, but not too far.
See Beginnings, Narrator, Suspension of Disbelief.