The Premise
R ecently, in the comments on The Kill Zone , Nancy J. Cohen stated, “In a murder mystery, [the premise] is usually who the victim is and where the body is found.” She’s actually wrong, but her statement is a premise . May sense? If so, you can stop reading now, but the rest of us are going to look at what a premise is. Many people have the idea that the premise is what the story is about. Frankly, I may be guilty of using the word that way from time to time, but if we look at the dictionary definition of premise we find that it is “a proposition that forms the basis of an argument or from which a conclusion is drawn” (Encarta Dictionary). In more simple terms, a premise is a statement we’re trying to prove. Many novelists take issue with this because they see themselves writing to entertain rather than to make a point, but when examining story structure it’s beneficial to look at the similarities between a story and a traditional argument. Before we go too deep, let’s look at an...