The Five Ps of Premise Prep are:
- Person
- Pain
- Prize
- Pitfalls
- Promise
The second P is for Pain.
This is a central pain, often a trauma, that has shaped your Person’s personality and still influences their decisions at the opening of your tale.
T.O.M.B.S.
While it’s easy enough to simply note what someone’s Pain is (selfishness, naivety, passivity, etc.), if you dig a little deeper, you can flesh out some of the foundational components of the Pain. This can be critical in crafting characters who read like fully realized entities with their own personalities. Familiarity with these components of a character’s, an audience’s, or your own psyche can elevate the writing of the entire book to new heights.
As a guide for understanding the mechanisms involved in a Person’s Pain, you can use “TOMBS”:
- Trait
- Origin
- Manifestation
- Benefits
- Sacrifices
TRAIT: What is the problematic characteristics that this Person has?
Your main character may be shy.
Your audience may believe they are stuck in a job that they hate.
You may have a temper that you’ve never quite learned how to manage.
Consider what problematic trait your Person has.
NOTE: The idea of something being “problematic” isn’t always because of the trait itself. Sometimes the trait is generally considered neutral or even positive, but in certain situations, it can be a liability. Being generous can be a wonderful thing until you’re surrounded by savvy manipulators. Being soft-spoken can be fine until you’re in a situation (war, noisy club, natural disaster) where you need to be loud in order to communicate and / or survive. Growing up wealthy and pampered sounds phenomenal to most people, until the money is lost and you have to figure out how to survive like the average person does. You have a lot of freedom and wiggle room when it comes to selecting a dominant trait that can get your main character into trouble.
ORIGIN
Now that you know what your Person’s problematic trait is, consider where it may have come from. What happened in this Person’s life to encourage the development of that trait? These circumstances can be acute or chronic. Acute situations are generally single-instance things that rocked a Person’s world so hard that they shifted how they think and behave as a response to it. For instance, may someone was sexually assaulted a single time by someone that they believe they could trust and that they cared deeply for (such as a parent). Even if this only happened a single time, the extreme trauma that it can cause can completely transform someone’s personality as they try to process and cope with what happened to them. From that point of the attack and onward, they may start developing traits like having a short temper, being withdrawn, or feeling suicidal, all of which can be problematic for a variety of reasons.
On the flip side, some circumstances are more prolonged, or even chronic. Something is generally considered chronic when there is no end in sight, so it seems like it’s a lifelong situation and not a temporary one. When it comes to the origin of someone’s Pain, this might look like years of physical and psychological abuse by a classmate, decades of ostracization due to a facial scar, or a lifetime of physical aches due to an autoimmune disease. The bullied child may develop into a passive adult because obedience ended the bullying interactions more quickly than trying to fight back. The Person with the facial scar may have developed dissociative symptoms to escape the crushing loneliness to the point that they have an imaginary friend they believe is real. The Person with the lifetime of physical hurt may have developed the trait of being stoic so as not to draw people’s sympathies so that they can try to live as normal of a life as possible while coping with their symptoms.
Whether short-term (surviving a plane crash, being abducted by aliens, etc.) or long-term (being diagnosed with cancer at the age of ten, attending medical school, etc.), consider what your Person went through that prompted the development of their problematic trait.
MANIFESTATION
What does this problematic trait look like on a day-to-day basis? How does it show itself in how your Person lives their life?
If your Person is overly aggressive, they might slam doors instead of closing them gently, yell when they don’t need to, or jump to conclusions instead of getting the information they need to make educated decisions.
If your Person lacks flexibility of thought, they may wear similar outfits each day, go to the same places at the same time each day, and get disproportionately angry when something unexpected happens.
Essentially, think about how you could tell that your Person was [insert trait here], even if you didn’t have a close relationship with them. If you could observe them for a day, what would stick out that would give you clues about their problematic trait?
BENEFITS
No matter how bizarre a particular behavior may seem to you, human beings don’t act without reason. The reason may not be rational, or legal, or safe. But it is there, nonetheless. How does your Person’s Pain benefit them? What does it do for them or protect them from?
The passive Person may see their quick obedience and quiet nature as a way to maintain peace and not get themselves hurt.
The overly trusting Person could enjoy the initial feelings of trust and comaraderie they have with people they’ve just met, even when the end result is some kind of financial, social, or physical harm.
The aggressive Person may feel safer being the aggressor than risking being victimized by someone again.
You don’t need a long list of benefits. One works! Pin down what your Person’s problematic trait does for them.
SACRIFICES
Th other side of the benefit coin is the sacrifices that are made when this trait is in action. What is your Person losing out on because of their Pain?
Someone who is gregarious may not get invited to quiet places or events such as cafes, orchestral concerts, or movies. They are missing out on opportunities for closer bonds with other people.
A Person who is has a phobia of water can miss out on professional ventures because they refuse to get on boats, drive or walk across bridges over rivers, or fly over lakes and oceans.
If your Person is a people-pleaser, they can suffer physically and financially if they will go to any lengths (buy anything, do anything, say anything, etc.) to keep someone in their life.
What is your Person giving up because of their Pain?
Nonfiction Pain
For nonfiction, such as self-help or textbooks, the Person’s Pain is going to be whatever major issue brought them to your book in the first place. This might be something like suspecting that they are living with undiagnosed autism, lifelong morbid obesity, or believing they are a bad parent because of a child’s problematic behavior. The symptoms of a particular kind of autism may be causing problems within the Person’s relationships or self-perception, influencing their personality. Never having lived at a healthy weight can drastically affect someone’s level of confidence. Not having the skills to managing a child for years on end can result in co-dependent relationships with a child, spouse, or other loved ones.
By the time these People go looking for a book like yours, they simply “are” the odd-ball guy in the office, or the shy girl who always wears two layers of clothes to cover her body, or the dad who is regularly physically, verbally, and financially abused by his son. Their specific issues will be covered in the Pitfalls section, but this major component of their struggle is what brought them to your work in the first place. Take some time to consider what would drive someone to come looking for a book about your topic of expertise.
Memoir, Autobiography, and Biography Pain
For a memoir, you’re going to have to dig deep and figure out what your Pain is, if you haven’t already. What is something that has become part of your personality that you developed because of a major and / or ongoing, painful experience throughout your life?
If you were molested for several years of your life, do you struggle with physical contact with others such as hugging your child or holding hands with a partner? If you were dismissed by both parents and your siblings as a child, do you now struggle with speaking up for yourself and avoid drawing too much attention to yourself? We all react to trauma in different ways, so these manifestations of that trauma may not exactly match what you went through. However, don’t be afraid to take an honest look at some of your most problematic character traits and examine why you started behaving this way in the first place.
The same goes for a biographical subject. It can be difficult if they aren’t around to interview, but you can often piece together what their Pain might have been based on journal entries, conversations with family members, or their behavior based on reports and footage from when they were still living.
Fiction Pain
This Pain is usually deeply tied to who your main character is as a person. Sometimes, this Pain springs from a pattern of behavior from past relationships with parents, siblings, dating partners, bosses, and the like. Examples would be recurring sexual abuse, bullying, or neglect.
Other times, this Pain springs up from a short-term, traumatic incident such as a few years in prison, a horrific accident, or a freak event like living through the world’s largest recorded tsunami.
The Pain comes from the incident itself, while the Person’s reaction to it and manner of coping with it supplies an obvious personality quirk.
One example would be child neglect. Let’s say Xeela was neglected as a child. She was ignored when she needed help or comfort, she was often left to starve if she couldn’t find or make food on her own, and getting sick as children often do meant she would need to rely on the Internet or television to come up with treatments for herself.She had to figure out her own way to school and back each day and learn to start paying important bills such as the electricity or water bills just to make sure that the apartment she was raised in was somewhat safe.
To deal with the resentment and loneliness that she felt because of being placed in the role of a single parent, Xeela developed many clingy, people-pleasing behaviors. She would do just about anything to keep people around her. This included giving them money, running errands for them, or agreeing with them even when they were obviously (and sometimes dangerously) wrong. This personality trait often came off to others as Xeela being needy, desperate, and even creepy.
Another direction this same Pain could branch off into is one of ultra-self-reliance. Xeela could have become so used to isolation that she learned to embrace it and push other people away, even when they attempted to befriend her. Xeela coped with her trauma by learning to do things for herself that her parents would have done for her if they had been mentally healthy enough to do so. While this might make Xeela an awesome employee, manager, or freelancer, it hurts her when it comes to being a sensitive sexual partner, a caring friend, or a loving parent. The need to take care of everything herself can often lead to burnout, tense relationships with people who want balanced reciprocation of responsibilities, and even physical harm when Xeela tries to do things like rewire her house or replace her own engine in her car instead of hiring professionals to do the work.
No matter what your MC’s major characteristic is (such as being too trusting, aloof, arrogant, or childish), this characteristic was born from their Pain. They’ve been using it to protect themselves emotionally or physically throughout their lives.
This trait could have been temporary armor against a painful situation. But since the trauma lasted so long, or was so severe, the armor melded into their psyche. Now they use the coping mechanism as easily as they breathe. It has been absorbed into their personality instead of being a role they can step into or out of at will.
For instance, a five-year-old being able to make dinner on their own, bathe themselves, and put themselves to bed one night each quarter while their parent (who has to pick up an extra shift each quarter to make ends meet) is at work, can be okay. The child is learning useful skills, but as soon as their guardian returns, they have another 89 days of not having to worry about that stuff. But if their parent is an alcoholic who doesn’t come home at least two nights each week (normally on the weekend), the child can start to become a pseudo-parent. They may become ultra-self-reliant because if they don’t, they won’t survive. It’s literally life or death for them.
Once you’ve pin-pointed their Pain, you have a starting point for a character arc.