Start your book premise by considering who the star of the show is going to be for your project.
The Five Ps of Premise Prep are:
Person, Pain, Prize, Pitfalls, and Promise
The first P is for Person.
This is the central character of your piece.
Your “person” can be some animal besides a human, an extraterrestrial, or a mythical creature. Your central character could also be a location, a concept, or an inanimate object. You’re free to choose multiple main characters as well, as with books like Danielle Steel’s The Apartment or scripts like Paul Haggis’ Crash.
But to keep things simple, I recommend sticking to a single human being.
For nonfiction such as textbooks and how-to guides, your ‘person’ is going to be your audience. If you’re writing a stress reduction book for single mothers under 25, your Person is a single mother under 25 years old.
Your person is going to be yourself if you’re doing a memoir or autobiography.
If you’re writing someone else’s biography, then the person and central focus is that particular figure. For example, if you’re writing a biography of Utada Hikaru, Utada is going to be your person.
Once you’ve pinpointed who your Person is going to be, you can add a few more details to describe them.
This includes fleshing out their physical appearance, defense mechanisms, mannerisms, and preferences.
Imagine you lost this Person. What would you tell the police about them when filing a missing person’s report?
Imagine that you want a friend to go on a blind date with your Person. What would you think are the pertinent details they need to know about your Person before the date?
Yes, you can still create this description of a concept, animal, or otherworldly being. If your central character is a concept like love, you can still talk about its importance to various kinds of beings around the world, or in the realm you’ve created, how flexible or inflexible it can be, how it sucks people in, how it hurts people, and so on.
When describing yourself for your memoir or autobiography, your perspective is helpful, but I encourage you to pull in the opinions of others as well. Your spouse, parents, siblings, children, and co-workers can often offer honest insights about you as a person that you never realized about yourself. Everything from a tendency to be self-centered to a nervous tick you didn’t know you had.
When describing your target market for your instructional piece, don’t be afraid to stop and do a little demographic research about your target market. Being able to properly define and describe them will not only help you write for them, it will help you promote your book more effectively to them.
Be ready to spend about five minutes on this portion of the book planning process. Then it’ll be time to move on to the Pain section. But don’t overexert yourself. If all you can think of right now is a name (Qualanthie, Steve, Turek, etc.), that’s fine. If after five minutes you can’t think of anything else about the character, completing the rest of the Ps can help, so just move on.
Remember that it’s okay to write things down that won’t make it into the book. Just like creating your brain board, you may make adjustments along the way that won’t exactly match your initial ideas. Now is not the time to edit. Now is the time to write!