Theme, premise, guiding light....

I've just started reading the classic of playwriting, The Art of Dramatic Writing, by Lajos Egri. (You can see where the guy who wrote How to Write a Damn Good Novel got most of his ideas. Pity Egri is long dead and can't sue him.)

Anyway, Egri's first and most emphatic point is that all the stuff about conflict and setting and tone and all that are only effects of something much more important: premise. The premise of Romeo and Juliet, for example, is "True love defies even death." The premise of Othello is "Jealousy destroys itself and the object of its jealousy." If you devise a strong, dynamic premise -- and only one -- you end up with a much better story. If you just kind of waffle along, writing what seems like a good idea at the time, you end up with a crap story.

Your job as a good writer is to find a powerful premise and use your story to prove or disprove it. (Usually prove.) If you believe your premise is powerful and true, and you set out to show how your characters and what happens to them proves the premise, you are much more likely to write a good story.

The reason I'm pondering this so deeply is that, although I've heard this advice before from various people, I am now in a position to start considering it in a much more personal way. (Probably a symptom of making it through Clarion: without much conscious decision, my awareness of deeper levels of meaning and technique seems to have expanded.)

So I'm looking at various pieces of my own writing, and asking "What is the premise?" Sometimes it's relatively easy to find. Sometimes it's hard. But up to now, I haven't been deliberately starting with a premise. Egri says you don't really have to start with the premise in the earliest stages of playing with a work. But by the time you're full-on into it, you'd better have figured it out. Or the rest of the piece is probably going to be crap, and definitely less than it could be.

Sobering thought.