On Nailing a Premise

Hi all,

Me again — sorry about the radio silence for the last little while, I’ve been deep in work that’s meant that I haven’t had much headspace to write anything else. Hopefully, we’re back on the same weekly schedule from here on in.

Enjoy!

James.

On Nailing a Premise

I love thinking about ideas for what to write next. It’s my favourite part of the writing process (probably because it doesn’t involve writing per see) — getting ideas down on paper, thinking about themes and characters and tone. What in the past I’ve had a bit more difficulty with is the rigorous process of working through which ideas would make a good series and — sometimes most importantly — which ideas will work with producers and buyers. Basically, I call that process nailing the premise.

Ideally what you want is a single sentence that explains in perfect clarity, what your screenplay is going to be about.

The content below was originally paywalled.

In the industry you might hear this sentence called the concept or the log-line: and producers, studio execs and marketers love it because it means they can understand a film very quickly (here are ten top tips on writing a log-line from the Raindance website). However, the importance of creating a premise sentence goes way beyond selling it to a producer (or for that matter a producer selling it to a marketing guy who can sell it to an audience).

I think the importance of creating a premise sentence for us as writers is to have a clear and concise idea of what we’re doing. It’s a mission statement, a foundation for the script we’re going to write, and a way for us to check back while we’re writing to make sure we’re on track.

For me a premise sentence tends to have three things:

Who? What? How?

The “Who” of the Premise…

The who should almost certainly be about your protagonist or the group of people who are at the centre of your story. Who your protagonist(s) are at the beginning of the story should be immediately apparent:

A bank robber who has decided to do one last job before he retires…

A monster who is afraid that he is losing his scare…

A group of kids with a dream of making it big in the music business…

Here are a few tips to make the “who” of your premise a) specific and b) precise:

Use job titles: but only if your character’s job is important to the action of your film.

Use adjective(s): but usually only one, and usually if they cut across what you’d usually expect of the person’s profession or social place: a lazy fitness instructor, a corrupt cop.

Tell us where they are: is the character stuck in a rut, are they doing something unusual that means we’ll be more interested in them?

Or tell us where they want to be: do they dream of doing something different, are they afraid that something new or scary is just around the corner?

The “What” of the Premise…

The what of your premise tends to be something that happens to your character to burst them out of their existing situation. It might be a good thing, that presents them with an opportunity. Or it may be a bad thing that sets them on the run. The key, for me, is that the “what” comes from outside, that it is dramatic, and that it provides your “who” a means of changing who they are.

… is tricked into stealing a safety deposit box owned by a Mafia boss…

… receives an invitation to the National Scaring Championships…

… arrive at a school for gifted musical children…

The “How (does your protagonist react)”…

This is a key part of your premise because it is going to give an indication of the content and the direction of the central thrust of your film or series.

In most cases, it should involve the protagonist battling both the “what” that has happening to them, as well as their own initial doubts/insecurities/fears or flaws. And, of course, it should provide a means for you to write a good 100 pages or so. Does it provide a fertile ground for trying a lot of different avenues? Can it throw up a number of different barriers to your protagonist’s goals?

If it is too precise and limiting, it will limit the rest of what you write.

… must go on the run in order to protect his family.

… must battle the world’s best monsters and his own insecurities to win.

… will do anything to come out on top.

As a matter of course, I don’t tend to include the ending of the story in my premise sentence. Why? Because the one guiding sentence of a screenplay should be about the process that your character is going through — that’s where the focus should lie.

I’ve been watching… The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

THE WOMAN IN THE HOUSE is a truly wild ride of a show. Ostensibly, it’s a pastiche of a particular genre of female-led mystery thriller (think GONE GIRL, or THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN). It’s a genre — like all incredibly popular, and therefore over-exposed genres — which is highly ripe for parody. In Kristen Bell, it has an extremely talented and capable lead and has all the gloss and production values of a Netflix own production. The only problem I have with it is in the execution.

Tone is so incredibly important — particularly for a show that has this meta- approach, critiquing the genre that it lives in. And for me, too often, The Woman in the House… was grasping around for the right tone, veering between broadly between wild Zucker-Brothers-eque farce (my God, Bell’s character fills her wine glass up) and spending half an episode taking its character and her fears seriously. It made me wonder whether at some point the show’s creators (or Netflix) suffered a loss of confidence in the central premise — or whether they wanted to have their cake and eat it too: desiring the caché of creating a knowing pastiche, while also capturing the audience who would watch this as straight genre fare.

I’ve been reading… Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga

BLACK AND BRITISH: A FORGOTTEN HISTORY is not only an incredibly erudite and well-researched piece of sprawling history, it also does something extremely unusual for a work of popular history — making an intervention in current debates, that completely changes the narrative.

Too often the history of Black people in the UK has been tied up with ideas of immigration, belonging and integration — for both those who hold racist views and those who would repudiate them. The book gives the lie to this underlying principle: that Black Britons are something other: they they are on the outside, either imposed upon or to be accepted by a native white population. The book places Black British people at the centre of the narrative and history of Britain itself, it makes their stories all of our stories, and is incredibly powerful for doing so.