The Promise of Premise

In a business in which irony is a useful tool, it is perhaps unsettling to realize that the term premise—unarguably one of the fundamental elements of storytelling—is so frequently misunderstood and misused within the universal writing conversation. It is often contextually abused by authors, agents, and even editors and reviewers, who refer to everything from story ideas to theme to plot slugline—even character arc—as premise, when in fact they are referring to those subsets specifically. None of which actually is, when regarded alone, an actual premise at all.

This imprecision is fine if writing conference conversations and online forums were all that matter. But when it absolutely does matter—as part of a pitch, in a query letter, and especially in the