Two years ago when my editors at Howard Books asked me what I was working on, I shared a couple of ideas with them. This high concept pitch caught their attention:
Can a young widow fall in love with her husband’s reflection?
Reminder: A high concept pitch is when you grab someone’s attention with a title or single sentence before they ever see a word of your writing.
I was thrilled my publisher wanted a third book from me – and just a bit proud that the pitch I’d worked so hard on had done just what I’d hoped it would do: grabbed my editors’ attention – and landed me another book contract.
But what’s that Proverb about stumbling over pride? (Proverbs 16:18) Yep, I fell flat on my face a few months later. That oh-so intriguing one sentence pitch had me in a headlock and refused to give up and say “Uncle,” so that I could wrestle it into a synopsis, much less a real story.
Beyond that single sentence I had a whole lot of nothing.
Caught somewhere between panic and despair, I Skyped with my mentor, Rachel. She listened to me wail and moan – thank God she didn’t snap any photos and post them on Facebook. I was a mess. When I finally lapsed into silence, Rachel congratulated me. That’s right – she congratulated me – in a “been there, survived that, and you will too” kind of way.
“You have a ‘paralyzing premise,’ Beth.” If she could have reached through the computer screen, I think Rachel would have patted me on the back.
Um … hooray?
So what is a paralyzing premise … and what was I supposed to do about it?
A paralyzing premise is one that seems to have a simple concept but when you start building your story, you have to do a lot of plotting and character work. You have to answer a lot of whys.
Let’s go back to my high concept pitch, which turned into my upcoming release, Somebody Like You:
Can a young widow fall in love with her husband’s reflection?
Simplifying this premise for my novel even more, the story is about the possibility of a young widow falling in love with her dead husband’s identical twin brother.
But … when I started plotting out the book, some major whys needed to be answered. Questions like:
- Why didn’t my heroine know her husband had a twin brother?
- Why hadn’t the two brothers talked for the past twelve years?
- Why would the brother get in touch with his brother’s widow?
- Why should the heroine have anything to do with her dead husband’s twin brother?
And to answer all these questions, I had to understand my characters – who they were, why they made the choices they made, and how they were going to interact with one another. Before I could go forward and write a single word of my manuscript, I had to delve into my characters’ pasts. I did this two ways:
- Working through The Book Buddy, a worktext that has great tools for developing your characters
- Brainstorming with Rachel, who knows how to ask “Why?”
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Paralyzing Premise: What is it & how do you fix it? Click to Tweet