The Freebie by Jason Black
[caption id="attachment_7568" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Crazy sky in your world? Sure!"]
[/caption]- Let's talk about your premise.
If you're smart and if you're doing your homework, you'll have read Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel, which talks a lot about how to build a premise for maximum inherent conflict. You'll have read Stephen King's On Writing, which talks about unearthing the fossil (which represents a gripping premise) from whatever shard of bone sticking up out of the soil first caught your eye. That's all great, but they're leaving something out. Something I think is critically important, and is also pretty cool when you think about the power it puts into the novelist's hands.
First, a lot of what goes into the early pages of our novels has to do with establishing what your premise is. If you're writing the novelization of the movie Die Hard, for example, you have to establish Bruce Willis's cop background, his estrangement from his wife, the German terrorists led by Alan Rickman, the office Christmas party scenario, and all that. If you're novelizing Groundhog Day, you have to establish weatherman Bill Murray, new producer Andie MacDowell, and the fact that Murray's character is stuck in the same day, in the same small town, over and over. You all understand this; it's just Premise 101. Here's the part Maass and King and the rest are leaving out:
You get one suspension of disbelief from the reader, for free.
That's it. The reader will give you one freebie. They will suspend disbelief for you, no questions asked, exactly one time. But consider, our stories are packed with stuff that's just not actually true. That's the nature of fiction. So how do you know what one thing the reader's going to happily go along with? This is the cool part:
Readers will automatically suspend disbelief about the one aspect of your premise that is most central to the story.
How awesome is that? Without even thinking about it, readers will swallow the deepest, most essential core of your story. Hook, line, and sinker. It makes sense. Readers do it because otherwise there's no story. If we don't accept the reality of German terrorists staging an operation on Christmas Eve in an L.A. high-rise building, then the whole story doesn't work.
If we don't accept Bill Murray stuck in a karmic time-loop, there's no story.
Choose wisely
I want you to notice something about those two examples. Almost everything in those two premises is easy to accept. It's easy to accept a divorced cop, estranged from his ex-wife, but still carrying a torch for her. It's easy to accept that he has traveled to her new city to visit his kids around the holidays. It's easy to accept Bill Murray as a weatherman and Andie MacDowell as the producer. Divorced cops, weathermen, news producers, these are all normal things. They are all parts of the everyday world readers live in, and thus they are easy to accept.
But it's not as easy to accept German outlaw commandos in an L.A. high-rise. It's definitely not easy to accept an unexpected time-loop. Yet, those are exactly the two things viewers willingly and without question suspended disbelief about, for the sake of the story. Those were the freebies. It's counter-intuitive, but that's what happened. How did the script writers get readers to give them a pass on the most difficult portions of the premise to believe? Because they made sure that the most difficult thing to believe was also the most essential aspect of the premise. Smart.
Your freebie can be anything. Literally. Come up with the single most wild, outlandish, impossible to believe thing you can imagine, and I guarantee you readers will go along with it so long as it's also the most essential aspect of the premise.
Use your freebie well. Align the most difficult thing to believe with the most important thing about the story too. How about an alternate world where human beings have molten gold pumping through their veins instead of blood? Sure, why not? Just come up with a story line that deeply relies on that.
That is, don't put dragons in your story's world if you're going to relegate them to the status of "rare creatures who only live in the most remote wildernesses and who have no effect on the rest of anything." Find the thing that's hardest to believe about your premise, and ask yourself if anything in the storyline would change if that thing weren't true. If the answer is "no, it would be pretty much the same story," then you haven't made good use of your freebie. If I use my gold-blooded humans to tell an otherwise ordinary story about high school romance, then I'm wasting the freebie.
You get one freebie. The rest is up to you
But, there's a catch. You knew there had to be a catch, right? It was all sounding too good to be true. Fortunately, the catch is something you ought to be doing anyway so it's not that big a deal. The catch is that absolutely everything else in your story must be logically consistent with the freebie. Not only must you use the freebie in a meaningful way, but you must carefully think through the logical implications of that freebie to make sure that everything else in the story works along with it.
Why? Because you only get one freebie. You can count on readers giving you one; the rest you have to work for through logical consistency. Everything else in the story has to be consistent with the freebie plus all the stuff readers know about how the real world works. If you blow it at this stage, readers will find they can't maintain their suspension of disbelief. They may still accept the core premise, but they won't be able to believe in the story as a whole.
For example, I once had a client whose manuscript involved a lost society of people living in caves, fully sealed off from the rest of the world, and had done so for a couple of hundred years. The writer had worked out how these people met their basic needs for light, food, and water. But he didn't keep it consistent with other things readers would normally assume. He had these people using tools brought in by the original settlers. But, tools wear out, and these people had no means to make new ones. Languages drift over time, so logically the people in the cave would speak a very different dialect than their ancestors had. Nevertheless, the top-siders who encountered these cave people could speak with them just fine. The people in this cave built individual houses to live in, but the houses had roofs. Why? It never rains in a cave. Why go to the bother of building a roof? Those failings to fully think through the implications of the freebie made it extremely difficult to suspend disbelief in the story as a whole.
Some other rules of thumb
Your freebie might be something completely mundane. Stories set in the real world, with ordinary types of people, are that way. My current work in progress is about a con-man in the Bronx. The core of the premise, the thing I'm going to get as a freebie, is simply the existence of this character. Many literary novels are like this. However, just because my freebie was something mundane does not mean I get a different freebie later on. I can't get away with waiting until the climax of the story to reveal something that's difficult to believe and should properly have been part of the original premise. Like maybe that my protagonist is actually a Soviet sleeper-agent left over from the cold war (he's not, by the way, but you see my point). I can't go around thinking that because the story hasn't involved anything that would be difficult to believe in the real world, that I can save up a big surprise like that for the end. Won't work. Our tribe calls this a deus ex machina solution, but really, it's a failure to correctly establish the premise.
Which leads to the other rule of thumb: Readers have to be able to figure out what the freebie is, or what it might be, very early in the novel. It can't wait too long. The novel's opening is the period in which the reader is figuring out what the rules for this story are. That's when we're figuring out how things work in the world of the story. If the freebie is something difficult to believe (like gold for blood), it's going to affect those rules in some meaningful way.
This hearkens back to that whole logical consistency thing. Readers need a sense of how consistency in the story's world works, in order to properly comprehend and reason about the events of the story. Which means that if you wait too long to establish the freebie, by the time you get to it readers will have already decided that they understand the rules for the story, and guess what? The thing you hoped would be the freebie will clash with those rules and readers won't go with it. Basically, if you wait too long, you'll inadvertently use up your freebie on something trivial.
Conclusion
You get one freebie. Use it wisely, reveal it or at least hint about it soon, and keep the entire rest of the story obsessively consistent with it. Do that, and all will be well.