You Don’t Need That Premise

Constance Verity Saves the World (Constance Verity Book 2) is dropping on July 17th. It’s part of a trilogy, and you’ve all been bugging me a while to write a series, so here it is. Happy?

In all seriousness, I think the book is pretty awesome, and it’d be great if it made a big splash in the publishing world. So, hey, if you liked the first book, buy the next one. Or just skip ahead and buy this one. While it is a trilogy, each book is also meant to stand mostly on its own. So have no fear of getting stuck in a cliffhanger or an endless series. Look, I can’t make you buy the book but it’d be really cool if you did.

Enough of that.

Let’s talk about premise. What makes a premise work. What makes them not work. And why a great premise is not always your friend.

Science Fiction and Fantasy often begin with a premise. It might be something simple like “Plane crashes on an island of monsters” or complicated like, “A robot struggles with his place in society”. But almost always the jumping off point is that thing that helps to define it as Fantasy, though not always. Sometimes, the Fantastic elements (essential as they might seem) are set dressing. And usually, it’s not readily apparent because it’s more than enough to sustain a single story.

But then someone tries to make another story from the same material and, well, it becomes readily apparent what is vital and what isn’t. Often sequels or series fail because they mistake the set dressings and mechanisms for the central element of the story. The question of what is important and what is dispensable isn’t always obvious, but an easy way to explore this idea is to ask can this element be replaced and we end up with basically the same story.

Jurassic Park is about a park where dinosaurs are cloned and things go wrong. Do you know what element is least important to that formula? The cloning. Yes, it feels wrong to say that, but if we were to rewrite the story to that of an eccentric millionaire who discovers a lost island of dinosaurs and decides to turn it into a tourist park, does anything significantly change? In the first film, I would say no. The central theme of Humanity’s Hubris versus Nature’s Power remains intact, and every event in the film could still happen in the exact same way. Basically: Jurassic Park is about dinosaurs, not cloning. It was never meant to be about cloning. The cloning was simply a justification, and it works fine in the story. But it can easily be replaced with a dozen other justifications and the story wouldn’t change significantly.

Now with Fallen Kingdom, the films are about cloning. And while there’s still plenty of dinosaurs running around, the misstep is that cloning was never really an issue in Jurassic Park. In fact, bringing up cloning makes us ask questions. Like if they can clone dinosaurs, can’t they clone other animals? The sequels even begin to add genetic modification to the process, which brings up even more questions. In a world with this technology, wouldn’t there be incredible repercussions? Cloning like this is fraught with real world issues, but, really, we’re here to watch people run from dinosaurs. The premise of the series is, and probably should always be, “Dinosaurs are Neat?”, not “Are clones property?” That’s a fine premise for a story, but not a Jurassic Park story.

Incredibles 2 makes the same mistake by assuming “Superheroes are illegal” is its premise, but that was always a convention. The original film could be about a pair of older superheroes who’ve settled down to raise a family, and the father realizing that he’s unhappy with his choices. Most of the conflict could exist. Making supers illegal is just a convenient way of jumping right to the point in the conflict, but as a premise, it was never what defined The Incredibles. By choosing to make it the central conflict of the sequel, the movie makes a huge misstep. Not only is it stuck telling the same basic story (but worse), but it renders the plot and villain’s motivation and actions nonsensical.

One of the reasons I tended toward standalone novels up to this point was because it’s far too easy to get distracted by mechanisms and premises when exploring an ongoing work. I’m not even sure I’ll be able to avoid it, since so many other great writers fall into that trap. (Not that I’m calling myself great here.) I will say that the premise of Constance Verity, of a pulp-inspired adventurer trying to find balance is something I choose specifically because I thought it had legs.

In The Last Adventure of Constance Verity, the premise is used to explore Connie’s quest for work / life balance.

In Constance Verity Saves the World, the premise is used to explore Connie’s tendency toward self-reliance and isolation.

There are plenty of premises that would allow these thematic explorations, but those premises would be very different in tone and style. The absurdity of Connie’s constant adventures is a defining characteristic for her outlook and the world she lives in. It could be retooled, but change it too much and while the theme might remain, Connie and her world wouldn’t.

Ideally, premise and story work hand-in-hand, but it’s not always necessary. There are tons of moments in the Constance Verity books where something weird happens where something else weird could happen. Considering how often peril menaces Connie, nothing is off the table. So when I create a reference to something in her past or have her ambushed by a peculiar circumstances, I’m not usually concerned with them creating a logical continuity. By default, Connie’s world isn’t logical. It’s full of chaos and danger and that’s the impression you should get.

A friend of mine coined The A. Lee Martinez Rule: “I’m not going to explain everything to you, but I won’t cheat.”

And explanations are often overrated anyway. It’s like writers bending over backwards to explain how Bruce Banner could transform into the Hulk or how the batcomputer got in the Batcave. It’s not that a writer can do anything without explaining it, but that if you have to work that hard to explain it, maybe consider it simplifying it. A premise should open possibilities, not remove them. And a story should rarely (never say never) be a long form justification for a story mechanism.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE