Something that stumps a lot of writers I see – including myself sometimes – is coming up with a decent novel premise to begin with.

I’ve a solid number of clients who tell me they want to make a living writing. While it’s great to have goals, chances are that’s not going to happen with just one book. It could take several novels before you’ve hit your breakthrough. Or maybe your debut could be your cash cow and now you’re left wondering how to follow it up.

Regardless of what the situation may be, it’s a fair question to ask: how do you come up with a good premise for a novel?

Some novel premises could actually start out as short stories or even poetry. Others may spawn from prompts in writing communities. Some others are ad-libbed. Most are inspired by TV, films, music, and other books.

There are some wild novels premises out there that can get readers reading instantly, like in YA fantasy. Wings by Aprilynne Pike is a faerie book series where a woman can basically turn herself into a plant; she would bleed tree sap instead of blood and could breathe underwater and could kiss a boy underwater because she produced oxygen as he produced carbon dioxide.

Some premises are highly elaborate. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is a genre-bending story covering multiple subplots, but the main plot pits two magicians against each other in a competition where they each do not know who their opponent is, what the rules of the competition are, or even when a verdict is reached, all as part of some cruel and unusual experiment by older, more bizarre magicians.

Sometimes the sheer idea of a story premise is so fascinating, it just makes people want to read it.

Pruning prose

There are several ways to go about this, but generally, my best advice is to never ‘pigeonhole’ your own writing. That is to say, don’t overly restrict yourself to one genre, one theme, one story. Be as broad as you can when you start out, then narrow it down as you continue.

Typically, and this is true of my own writing, your story will flow better if you write without restrictions. Somewhere, hopefully during the midpoint of your story, you should be able to discover what the story really is beyond just the premise.

You’ll find your narrative voice and hone it, and once you’ve covered the main idea, you can go back to proofreading the scenes and chapters that may not quite fit with the message and flow of the story and polish it up a bit. This is called the ‘pruning’ prose.

‘Spitball approach’

Something my friends/clients/colleagues and I like to do in our “writing workshops” is spitball quick elevator pitches or just movie concepts that we probably will never have the budget to create but would absolutely love to see.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, famous for co-authoring Good Omens, used to say they would spitball ideas off each other all the time. Sometimes, even, their ideas would float from head-to-head. No verbal communication needed.

The reason I love spitball approaches is they’re easily the most fun and creative approach to any type of writing. While the caveat is that they’ll usually need a lot of revision due to running into plot holes and running out of ‘what ifs’, most books of any type, style, or premise are going to need heavy revisions anyway. Your first draft will always be a mess, no offense, but that’s why editors exist!

Conflict-First

Conflict is what drives the story forward, and what intrigues us as readers. We don’t read stories about someone who went to pick something up from the store (sorry to my slice-of-life genre readers).

There are many types of conflict:

• Character vs. Character.
• Character vs. Nature.
• Character vs. Self.
• Character vs. Society.
• Character vs. Supernatural/God.

There could be a particular character arc or struggle that you start with, and by all means, do more than just one! Perhaps you want to tell a revenge tale, this would be character vs. character, but also character vs. self because inevitable all revenge stories end in 1 of 3 ways. 1) Their revenge is thwarted in some way; 2) They get their revenge, but at the cost of everything else they cherished; 3) They forgive their enemies, realizing revenge isn’t the answer. Whichever option it is, some psychological conflict (character vs. self) is at-play.

_{^{[Trigger warning: suicide]}} One time, we came up with a story of a robber, clad in a ski-mask, who broke into the home of a man who committed suicide by hanging. It created a fascinating psychological dilemma for a character – who is already immediately established as morally gray from the mere act of robbery – who now has to make a decision. Obviously, if he reports the body, he’s directly exposing himself to the police when they investigate. But if he leaves the body, will the guilt then consume him? And finally, if he still commits the robbery anyway, will he still consider it sinful to take the belongings of someone when they are dead?

Psychological dilemmas can carry a story in their own right. Take Breaking Bad, for instance, where our main character Walter White, is faced with his own mortality in just the first 20 minutes of the series when he is diagnosed with cancer, re-encounters his old high school student who is now a meth dealer, decides he’ll use drug money to pay for his cancer treatment, and finds himself in the middle of a druglord operation, a war with the cartel, and a DEA investigation. Moral dilemmas aplenty, which is part of what makes it such a dynamic and invigorating masterpiece of television.

There are much more tame moral dilemmas. Wedding Crashers with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn is solely predicated on the idea of two guys whose entire shtick is crashing weddings in order to sleep with bridesmaids, until one falls in love. A once shallow character for once becomes deeply invested in someone and has to come to terms with his own rampant lifestyle. And it’s funny as sh*t.

Character-first

Perhaps a novel can stem simply from creating one singular character. This is usually how a lot of series get started. “Oh, this is a Jack Reacher novel”, or “hey, this is a Mark Angelotti book”. One way or the other, the character’s essence is what drives the books forward.

Say, one day you’re on the porch sipping from an orange soda and you begin musing about a character, we’ll call him Matt, and Matt is a lazy genius. So brilliant, he can solve Harvard-level problems, but doesn’t have the energy or the will to do anything with it. This is his eternal conflict, but now he must navigate life with it.

Simple premise, but it already presents a story conflict, a set-up, and a direction for the story as well as a character arc (and it’s also the premise of the movie Good Will Hunting, an all-time classic and a favorite film of mine).

I started my book-series-in-progress Angelic this way, when I was in a car ride for 15 hours driving back from Tennessee to my home in Pennsylvania after a mission trip, and I thought up a character. An angel, female, interacts with missionaries, revolutionaries, and what-have-you, and tries to restore God’s faith in humanity. How the story would go, I had yet to write it, but already I had a premise, a conflict, and a character arc, so as soon as I got home, I typed away…

Scene-first

Perhaps you have a particular scene in mind, and who the characters are is irrelevant. You could be doing one thing, see or read about something, and all of a sudden, a scene in your head starts to take shape.

Joan Didion once wrote parts of her novel Run, River based off a magazine article she read about a man killing his farm’s foreman somewhere in the Carolinas. Didion changed it to her native state, California, and sent half the book to a publisher, receiving a small advance for the last half.

It’s sort of like prequel-writing, except now there’s no original book or source material to use as a frame of reference, only your own imagination and what’s been put down on the page so far. That’s why I recommend to outline, outline, outline! And annotate your chapters.

A tip from myself as an agent, you’re likely going to need a chapter list anyway for when your agent is sending out book proposals. Some publishers will specifically request them.

A lot of books will also play around with this idea and flip the story chronologically and begin with the end. Out of Love by Hazel Hayes is a good example of this.

There’s also parallel narratives, where one storyline happens in the not-too-distance future and the other starts at, well, the start. Thus, the climax (or first inflection point) occurs right when the two storylines merge.

Bird Box by Josh Malerman, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens are all famous books which are written this way. Christopher Nolan’s Memento is probably the best film example of this technique.

First-hand experience

The go-to for memoir and non-fiction, sure, but this can be true of fiction writing as well. The usual adage for first-time writers is to “write what you know”. Which is great advice, seriously. While fiction is, well, fantasy; imagination, made-up, not real life, whatever it is that some may say, the truth is that fiction is very, very much based in reality.

Everything we write, consciously or not, is based on some truth in our lives. There is a basis upon which these ideas enter our heads, and most of the time, it’s from our first-hand experiences.

Toni Morrison, famous for writing Beloved, once wrote a book based off a young black girl she met in elementary school who claimed her biggest wish was to have blue eyes. It was the inspiration behind her novel, The Bluest Eye.

Most all of Hemingway’s work, from Islands in the Stream to The Sun Also Rises, are probably based off his own real-life experiences in the world wars, fishing in the Caribbean, and watching bullfights and matadors in Spain.

So, yes, write what you know, and start with something that really speaks to you. Create a scene, a character that’s you or some fragment of you, and let the pen flow from there.

Working with others

A lot of great ideas just come from working relationships. Supposedly, Uma Thurman proposed the idea for the Kill Bill movies with Tarantino while on the set of Pulp Fiction. The idea for an ‘Oppenheimer movie’ came from Robert Pattinson on the set of Tenet with Christopher Nolan (although, Pattinson never got to appear in Oppenheimer due to scheduling conflicts). Same thing with Kyle Maclachlan and David Lynch on the set of Dune (1984) brainstorming their eventual partnership on the TV series Twin Peaks.

On the literary side, Stephen King and Peter Straub were fans of each other before finally collaborating on the book The Talisman. Of course, I mentioned earlier the collaborations between Gaiman and Pratchett, who often came up with new novel premises side by side. Peter Jones and James L. Garlow were so fumed about The Davinci Code by Dan Brown’s inaccurate facts and attempts at disproving the divinity of Jesus that they joined together to write Cracking DaVinci’s Code, a side-by-side parallel story, one-half providing the historical critique of Brown’s work, and the other half providing a light-hearted story about a confused college girl finding Jesus.

Inspiration happens in all sorts of ways. Most books are based off the same 4 or 5 story structures, but it’s what you do with it that sets it apart from the classics and the contemporaries.