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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Everyday Canvas
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte
This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts.
December 20, 2015 at 7:04pm December 20, 2015 at 7:04pm
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Recently I read a book on Premise.
Powerful Premise: Writing the Irresistible (Red Sneaker Books) by William Bernhardt
In the blurb it says:
“A powerful premise is what separates ordinary novels from bestsellers. William Bernhardt explains the essential elements of breakout books, stories that reel in readers and attract serious attention. He discusses all the essential elements: originality, high stakes, believability, inescapable conflict, emotional appeal, and others. Plus, in the final chapter, Bernhardt explains how to turn your powerful premise into a winning pitch to attract agents and editors.”
The book is all that and then some; however, the “and then some” part got to me. Premise, to my understanding, is what we come up with, before we start writing. Reading the book, however, gave me the idea that the way the author described it, it could only be written after the full story is written, or at least, after its first draft is finished.
This in itself is not a bad idea, if one has finished the first draft and is about to rewrite the novel. For promoting and introducing the novel to an agent or a publisher, it could be priceless. However, it is not the premise we can use before we put the first word in the first chapter.
On the other hand, this book can be used in its entirety for learning how to write fiction, a novel, or a short story, as it encompasses a lot of good material. For premise before the first draft, however, we need as short a form as we can get to guide us along the way.
I agree that knowing as much of the premise as one can helps the writing. Some teachers say to find the premise of a story we are reading is to find the end and then the beginning and figure out how that change came about, but that is for reading, and another after-the-fact advice.
The best premise advice I came across is in another book on writing by James N. Frey, titled The Key. He says to think of four C’s and make the premise statement include those four elements, which are: Conviction or the idea of the author, Character, Conflict, Conclusion. This I can live with better, as I can more or less use it before beginning the writing process.
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