The Five Ps of Premise Prep are:
The fourth P stands for Pitfalls.
Now it’s time to have fun putting your Person through the wringer!
Pitfalls are just the things that stand between your Person and their Prize.
These could be physical barriers or impairments such as mountains, blindness, security guards, walls, missing limbs, wild animals, moats, or diseases. The princess can’t reach her beloved because of the wall the villain has built around the castle. The toddler can’t get the cookie tray because it’s on a high counter. The new-hire can’t get to their first day of work on time because of a traffic jam.
Pitfalls could also be psychological hurdles such as resentment, anxiety, hallucinations, pride, or issues with cognition. The princess can’t communicate well with her beloved because they speak two different languages. The toddler struggles to eat a cookie because their newfound sense of boundaries means they want to get permission from an adult first. The new-hire can’t get to their first day of work on time because of the panic attack that hit them as they were on their way out the door.
Events can also get in the way of your Person’s progress toward their Prize. An unexpected pregnancy (of themselves or someone else), getting laid off from work, bumping into an old nemesis, getting burglarized, failing a test, crashing a vehicle, or losing an important item are all events that could derail any plans related to obtaining their Prize.
The possibilities are endless when it comes to creating the hurdles that your Person will have to clear in order to get their Prize.
Memoir Pitfalls
If you’re writing a memoir, you won’t need to create Pitfalls because you already know what they are. You know the various objects, people, and events that stood between you and your goals. For this section, you’ll just be listing the ones that you plan on including in the book. Because you’ll later fill out more details about each thing (what it was, where it came from, what it was like to deal with it, how you dealt with it, the emotional impact it had on you, etc.) even a list of ten things could serve for a robust volume about your life experiences. But, you can add as many, or as few, as you like.
Self-Help / Instructional
For those writing something instructional, the Pitfalls are going to be the problems that you want the reader to avoid. For example, if you’re writing a book about how to grow a landscaping business, you’re going to want to add that people shouldn’t waste their marketing dollars advertising on blogs about apartment living or to people under the age of eighteen because you won’t be likely to find any new clients there. Trying to advertise to those groups would be a Pitfall between the reader and their Prize of growing their landscaping business. For how-to work like this, you want to do your best to anticipate the problems that people may run into while trying to achieve their Prize. Of course, any direct experience you have with making mistakes should be highlighted as well so that you can help them avoid the same issues.
Write out what Pitfalls you want your character to have to deal with, which pitfalls you want to highlight in your life story, or what problems you think your readers need to know about in order to be able to avoid them.