It’s the middle of summer and that latest blockbuster tentpole movie is playing at your local theater. You’re excited. Your friends are excited. The whole world is excited. You know it’s gonna be a hit. But then you see it and you’re like, “Eh. It was okay.” The cast was great, it had amazing special effects, cinematography, action; the works. Yet, you still left that theater feeling as though you went to a buffet and consumed nothing more than flavored air. It felt... empty.
Why does this seem to be a common experience with these kinds of big-budget summer flicks? I could go on a diatribe about the Hollywood System and how their priorities have shifted more towards profits over great storytelling, but that’s not what this article is about nor is it gonna do you any good to get all huffy over well-moneyed production companies making plastic summer movies that suck. That energy should be devoted to learning how to make movies that are original and good because the truth is Hollywood isn’t going to change, so it truly is up to you to make that change, and the best way to do it is to master the craft and develop great movies that are independent of Hollywood.
The bad news is, it’s really hard to do, especially the writing part. But the good news is, it’s not impossible. In fact, if you consider what I’m about to unpack, then you can virtually turn any bad idea into a good story with enough experience and elbow grease. It’s two simple little things, but extremely important things: Your premise and the moral conversation surrounding your premise.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To truly appreciate and understand why it’s even worth developing these things for your story, I think it’s important to take a moment and explain why we engage in creative writing in the first place.
The Purpose of Creative Writing
I used to think that creative writing was just something we did to express ourselves and entertain others. But after doing it for eight years, I’ve come to find that it’s actually a lot more. While there’s an entertaining value to storytelling, that entertaining value stems from the satisfaction we get from watching something that can help us make better sense of ourselves and the World around us. Even when we watch predictable movies, if they’re great, we feel a sense of completeness because every well-crafted story simulates the experience of discovery and learning in some capacity.
It’s a similar experience we have when we put in a lot of hard work just to get to that “Eureka” moment; when the pieces all come together and suddenly what you were learning about makes total sense. It’s a feeling of accomplishment and a sense of wholeness with one’s self.
That’s what movies simulate for us and that’s why we crave it so much. It’s a great feeling and it gets people to sit down for an hour and a half, so the industry’s modus operandi is to create stories whose very structure makes you feel this way. And when a movie can do this really well, it’s generally praised highly. But when a movie does this too predictably, even if it’s really effective at creating the simulated experience, it’s not praised as highly as it would have been had it been far less predictable. So the Adam Sandler movies will rake in the bucks because they’re well-crafted, but movies like Fight Club or Parasite will be remembered by the people who’ve seen it like Citizen Kane because they’re well-crafted and unpredictable, which makes the experience more unique and memorable.
And this is why your premise and moral conversation are so fundamental because they help you supplant that sense of discovery and learning into your stories. So let's take a quick dive into these two concepts to really understand what I mean. Now, this is going to be a little confusing and at times it will feel completely unrelated to writing, so to better understand what I’m about to explain, cement this point into your train of thinking.
A story’s anatomy and physiology pretty much boil down to two broad components. There are the physical things that are happening and being said (the anatomy) and then there is the meaning or significance behind those actions and words, which are all related to one another (the physiology). So in order to make good choices in your stories you need to know the meaning behind them and how that meaning all connects to one another. Makes sense? Okay, now let's go down the rabbit hole.
Your Premise
This is a household term that everyone in and outside of writing has heard of, but it's funny because it’s also one of the most misunderstood terms. A lot of people seem to think that a premise is a one-sentence statement of what your story is about. That’s a logline, which is also important to understand, but before you even learn about loglines you need to know what a premise is because it’s your premise that ultimately shapes your logline and pretty much every other choice you make when crafting your story.
A premise is a one-sentence statement that writers use to center their entire story around. It is not a statement that describes your story. Rather, it’s a statement that expresses an arguable truth within your story.
So let's say you want to write a meaningful quirky comedy about Jack Black forming a psychological condition where every ugly girl he sees actually looks beautiful to him. Give it a cute title like Shallow Hal and bingo, you got a hit story, right?
It’s a good starting point, but if you were to begin writing this now and you didn’t know what you were doing you would likely end up writing a much flatter version of the story, not because you’re uncreative or talentless, but because people starting out fail to realize that all of the choices they make should align consistently to their premise. If you fail to do this, then your story fails to have meaning and depth, and even a dumb quirky comedy from the early 2000s needs that in order to get people to buy the movie. There are certainly exceptions to this, but trust me when I say that most of those movies end up never getting made.
So to lay out a solid overarching foundation for their story to build on, writers will start with a premise statement, whether they write it down or simply think about it while writing their story. A pro working on an idea like “Shallow Hal” might start with the gist of the plot along with a single premise statement to weave in such as, “Love comes from within.” A nice little statement, sure, but if you read carefully, it’s a statement that can actually be argued and unpacked. Does love come from within or are there other factors that come into the fold? Maybe it’s favors or how much you depend on someone? Maybe it’s beauty? Perhaps love is nothing more than an illusion and it doesn’t come from anywhere?
Okay, so how does any of this have to do with writing a story? Well, think about it. When you write a story, you’re given total freedom to create whatever you want, but inasmuch as having that freedom, you’re also plagued by an infinite number of good and bad choices that you as the writer must make, and you must choose wisely because the wrong choices mean that you’ll be constructively criticized by your friends and vehemently ridiculed by strangers, but worse, you won’t successfully make it as a writer or at least the chances will be slim.
This is why starting with a premise is so important because it helps you distill the infinite amount of choices down to a manageable amount. It’s like your compass to help you navigate through the infinite realm of creative possibilities. Your premise grounds you into a sandbox; a sandbox that’s still vast and deep, but one that shields you from the madness of too many possibilities. With a premise, you can make your primary choices much more easily and from your primary choices, you can then make all of the other tiny little choices, like your character’s morning routines or what they do for a living. As long as it all ties back to the premise.
This is why in the movie “Shallow Hal” the main character is a fat showboat because it shows the irony that relates to the premise, “Love comes from within”. We would expect a fat guy to see love from within, but it turns out at the beginning of the movie he’s the complete opposite, which makes him hypocritical. So just that tiny premise statement alone combined with the fact that it’s a comedy allows you as a writer to reach an interesting choice like that.
If the writer blindly went into it without considering these things, then it's entirely possible Hal would have ended up being a slick good-looking pickup artist or worse, a regular average joe. Sure, you can still technically write a story with this character, but without that premise to guide you to the optimal choices, you’re liable to create a flat story with flat characters who don’t learn anything or cause the audience to learn anything. Your story will lack depth and meaning so you better hope your plot is fascinating enough to allow your audience to ignore this fundamental mistake.
Developing a premise concurrently with your logline or general story idea is a great way to get your brain in the right creative ballpark so you’re able to make those powerful choices and ultimately form a logical and meaningfully related matrix of choices, action, dialogue, etc. But that’s only a part of the equation. In order to tell a good story, you need to also indirectly express the alternative views that challenge your premise.
Moral Conversation
Imagine you’re at a bar with your friends and one of your friends starts the conversation with, “This table is brown.” Well, aside from the fact that it’s weird and everyone would wonder if their friend is on drugs, no one would really know how to respond to that or even argue against it. They would just awkwardly agree and move on. Now imagine instead of starting the conversation with that, they start with a story about how they just landed their dream job before ending with the proclamation that all of us are the masters of our own destiny.
That’s an interesting conversation especially since now everyone else can go around and express their opinion on the fundamental point he’s making, which is that we are the masters of our own destiny. Perhaps someone at that table will agree with him, but not everyone will. Some might believe more in fate. Others may believe in neither and think it’s a chance with a little bit of elbow grease. Either way, a conversation has now formed and the central argument within that conversation is whether or not we are the masters of our own destiny.
The same way we engage in such a conversation very much resembles the way we structure good stories, which is why I often like to explore my premise by writing out a sort of moral conversation, which ultimately helps me better understand the overall significance of what it is I’m writing.
A moral conversation is really just a fancy way to describe this little exercise I like to do when I’m first starting to flesh my idea out. All I do is open up a word doc and start writing what my central point is (the premise) and the philosophical arguments supporting that premise. Then I develop the strongest counterpoints to that premise and flesh out the arguments supporting them. With all of that information laid out, I can then see how these two arguments can mesh together and form the central point.
Sounds like an academic paper more than fictional writing. Well, if you honestly think about it, a fictional story is structured very similarly. You have a protagonist who embodies an outlook on life and along a journey, they are propelled through, the main character is confronted with obstacles and opponents who embody the complete opposite outlook, which ultimately challenges their initial assumptions and reveals the folly of their outlook. And as the story progresses, the tension between the protagonist and the antagonist (the two competing outlooks) is intensified all the way to a kind of final battle whereby at the end of it all, a new outlook is formed (the premise or moral of the story), which has resulted from a synthesis between the main character’s original outlook on life and the antagonist’s outlook.
So developing your moral conversation is essentially developing the meaning behind your story structure. Your premise is your starting point and the moral conversation is an extrapolation of that premise and the various facets that support or don’t support it. And if you can establish all of these things before you really start to develop your story, then you can create your story with intent and understand exactly why you made the choices that you did, instead of understanding them from a cause and effect standpoint.
For instance, maybe your main character tries really hard to enjoy their day with someone and while grabbing ice cream, they accidentally drop a cone. The person they are with tells them it’s okay and that they don’t really want any, but the other person keeps insisting, eventually snapping and saying, “I just wanna have a good day! Okay?” The surficial reason for why they might have snapped was because they lost a loved one the other day and they’re grieving. That’s the cause and effect reason. But let's say your premise is, “You can’t run away from your problems.” The deeper reason behind that action then could be the fact that the person always seems to run away from their problems, which in this case he lost a loved one and is trying to ignore it by having a good day.
That’s really what we mean by creating meaningful choices. They’re not just choices due to cause and effect events within the story. They are choices based on a deeper meaning related to your premise and establishing a moral conversation allows you to get a better sense of the obstacles and other characters that you can create within your plot, which will ideally strengthen the meaning of your story.
Conclusion
A story is really just about creating allegories to express an arguable truth about life and the counterargument to that truth about life. That’s why taking the time to really flesh out your premise and moral conversation is so useful because the premise gives you a realm to work in and a moral conversation helps you structure that realm. That’s really your hidden skeletal structure behind the story. Everything else is the creative representational elements used to indirectly express the skeletal structure, such as the way you design your characters, their relationships, the plot structure, style, tone, pace, etc.
We often focus more of our energy on those things than we do on the underlying reasons behind the choices we make to build those things and that’s honestly why so many people think writing is impossible to do. They’ll plot their stories out, design their characters, and even structure their script appropriately. But at the end of the day without a strong premise and a great understanding of your moral conversation, you’re likely to end up creating flat stories that fail to really move an audience.
It’s just like a philosophical paper, only instead of using heady words, you’re using action, dialogue, and characters. You’re using entertainment to express philosophy, which is a very beautiful and sacred thing because philosophy is what actually shapes the way we live, the way we interact with others, and even the way we govern ourselves and conduct science. But most people don’t have the time or patience to sit around and read heavy philosophy books. So using mainstream entertainment to express these deep questions and assumptions can honestly be a transformative experience for millions of people and literally reshape the entire world around us for better and for worse.
It’s easy to see the job of a writer as unimportant and only for entertainment purposes. Sure, we’re obviously not as important as doctors, but I’ll put it to you like this. Even if we fell back into the Stone Age, we would still see people sitting around a campfire telling stories because no matter what, even if we lost everything, we would still want to discover and learn. We would still want to make meaning out of the World because the alternative to not knowing is...Well, it’s madness.
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Story Prism, LLC
Meaning Out of Madness
Hi Matt, insightful read. Just to add an example of a book that not only has an underlying moral argument, but has it out and discussed in plain view, is Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. The moral argument being on the morality of bringing long-extinct animals into the modern day world for entertainment, as well as the expectancy of humanity being able to control them.