Leaning into your premise

[sholio]

Just FYI, my latest book as Zoe, Dancer Dragon, is out on Amazon now.

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There's something I've been thinking about lately, after some conversations with rachelmanija about ... well, it didn't even start out about writing at all; it was just that she was looking for books set in circuses and observing how few books with circuses in the title and/or on the cover are actually ABOUT CIRCUSES. And then we got to talking about it, and now I'm seeing examples everywhere of books (and movies, TV shows, etc) that promise to be about something interesting and then disappoint because they don't lean in. There's a circus on the cover, but only one chapter is set there, or the whole book is set there but it might as well be anywhere because they never really do circusy things.

It's intriguing to me how often books/movies do this, and how I've never actually seen this (as such) in any advice I've ever read -- lean into your premise, your setting, whatever's unique about your characters. Use it. I guess it's sort of a Chekhov's gun kind of thing (that everything in the book should serve an eventual purpose) but it's not exactly that. It's more like, if you're going to put ghosts in your book, why not use them to do uniquely ghosty things rather than just floating onstage for their one moment? If your protagonist is a con artist, she shouldn't solve problems like a normal law-abiding person would! I think a number of the works of fiction that have disappointed me have done it because, on some level, they were failing to do this. I can remember being annoyed, for example, with books that tell you about somewhere fascinating the characters might go, but never actually take you there.

(Insert obligatory disclaimer that it also depends on what an individual finds interesting; some people will be there for the detailed descriptions of dressmaking and some really wish you'd skip the dresses and get straight to the murder, etc.)

But honestly, even if it's not something the reader is actually into, I think that writing it so that it fills the page makes it interesting. I could not have cared less about either sailing or the Napoleonic Wars, but Patrick O'Brian's books are wall-to-wall both of those things, and they actually make me care about page after page of nautical terminology and blow-by-blow descriptions of battles, because he cares. You can practically feel the creaking of the deck under your feet.

... And you know, like anything else, not everything interesting has to appear on the page; maybe being stuck somewhere the protagonist finds dull is the plot. But I mean, even there, the reader shouldn't be bored, reading it; the dullness of the setting should fill the page until it becomes fascinating, like the vivid grayness of Dorothy's Kansas. The issue is when, as a reader, you find yourself thinking, "Why did you even tell me about that interesting thing if you weren't going to show it?"

To be fair, Dancer Dragon probably could lean in a lot more than it does. If readers are reading it for detailed descriptions of ballroom dancing they're probably going to be disappointed. On the other hand, there's definitely dancing in it; it's just really more of a thing the plot wraps around than the main plot. There's also the problem that what I know about ballroom dancing could fill a very small thimble with room left over.

I got some negative reviews on the first book in the series, Bearista, because it didn't have enough coffee shop in it! I mean, you wouldn't think coffee shops are something that people reading a romance novel would really care about, but they actually did; the premise promised a big dude working in a coffee shop, but we actually only got a couple chapters of that before Plot Happened and he ended up exiting stage right pursued by bears (literally). In retrospect I think the book those readers wanted to read would have been a fascinating book, and maybe I should write that book eventually.

Anyway, I don't really have a point here so much as ... I don't think this should be treated as any kind of a hard-and-fast rule, but it's another tool in the toolkit for editing and tightening a flabby plot. If your story feels flat, maybe you need to lean into the premise a bit more.

Comments

[sholio]

I don't mean misleading covers/titles, like Dragons in the Waters or The Young Unicorns, neither of which feature dragons or unicorns but which never suggest that they will in the book itself. I mean when the book promises to be about something, and then never really engages with or features it.

Right, exactly! It's not a failure of the book if the title/cover is clearly metaphorical, and if some offhand reference to something the author never meant to be important sounds more interesting to me than the entire rest of the book, it's probably just that I'm a poor fit as a reader.

But Wiseguy is such a good example of a show that never fails to use its premise to the fullest. If there is ANY opportunity for Vinnie and Frank to pretend not to know each other, or for characters sneaking around in which each of them has about 1/3 of the relevant information, or for Vinnie's ordinary life to collide headlong with his undercover life, they are gonna ride that as far as it'll go. The writers clearly love undercover tropes, and mafia tropes, and you never get the impression that they've pulled back from something interesting that might otherwise have happened.

As opposed to, say, that Mrs. Pollifax book where she hides out in a carnival and they joke about having her go undercover as a fortune-teller and then everyone's like "haha, but of course we wouldn't do that" and she goes and does something way less interesting instead. WHY DO YOU TORMENT US, DOROTHY GILMAN.

[rachelmanija]

Yes! I was literally thinking about Mrs. Pollifax at the carnival when I was typing, then forgot to post it. Gilman does use the carnival as a setting, but she suggests that she'll really engage with it by having Mrs. Pollifax pose as a part of it - and in a really revealing, juicy, stakes-raising way too - only to not do it and do something boring instead. WHYYYY.

Or all the many books that are about people growing wings or horses born with wings and then NOBODY EVER FLIES.

[sholio]

Yeah, I think the Pollifax book would be at least 50% less frustrating if she didn't tease with the possibility of something way more interesting and then doesn't do it.

and in a really revealing, juicy, stakes-raising way too

.... actually, that might be one reason why it's so frustrating when books fail to do this, because those missed opportunities generally would raise the stakes quite a bit -- expose the character to danger, threaten to reveal something about them (or force them to confront something about themselves), etc. As readers, I think we unconsciously respond to the possibility of that and then feel frustrated when we don't get it.

Also, from your comment above this one:

Season 4 of Buffy disappointed me because after three seasons of magical metaphors for high school experiences, I was really looking forward to magical metaphors for college experiences. But there was very little of that in the season. It instead had a Big Bad that had nothing inherently to do with college, and while it did have a fair amount of stuff about living away from home, there wasn't much that was specifically college. I wanted demon roommates and tests that will kill you if you don't pass them and vampire professors and parties where everyone gets possessed and haunted dorm rooms

Okay, NOW I REALLY WANT THIS and I can't actually think of anything out there like it. (Magicians might be, for all I know, but I don't really get the impression via osmosis that it's doing it in this particular way.) If there is not already a series like this, there really needs to be.

[rachelmanija]

It does exist! It's a Diana Wynne Jones book called Year of the Griffin. It's further removed from our context than what I'm describing, as it's a world where griffins and other magical beings exist and go to college, but it has professors worrying about their grants getting yanked if their spells don't work and griffins pulling all-nighters and so forth. And it's really funny.

The Magicians is similar but not quite that. I will say that among its many problems, failure to lean into its premise is not one of them. I just find its premise aggravating as it's so close and yet so far from what I actually want to read.

[sholio]

Oh right! I have read that book, a long time ago. It doesn't surprise me that DWJ wrote something like that.

failure to lean into its premise is not one of them. I just find its premise aggravating

Hahaha. A problem of a slightly different nature.

[helen_keeble]

If you are looking for Harry Potter But At College, the entire PNR Academy subgenre has you covered. :-) I’d say A LOT of people are looking for exactly this thing, which makes it odd that a tv show hasn’t gone there (apart from The Magicians, which is reeeeeaally not leaning into its tropes so much as pulling them apart to show how shitty and terrible everything is)

[sholio]

I don't know if it's precisely what Rachel's talking about, though! From what I've seen of the genre, which admittedly wasn't a whole lot, I've gathered they're more like what she was saying S4 Buffy was, where the college is a backdrop but it's not really about the College Experience, so much as it's a gloss of college over a romance plot (in a similar way to how Bearista is a gloss of coffeeshop over an action plot).

Or am I wrong about that? I could be wrong!

I do think it's weird there aren't more TV shows set in college or with early-20-somethings in general; it's a weirdly underserved niche in fiction, especially with New Adult taking off as a genre category.

[ginger_rude]

The Magicians books, or at least the first one, did go into quite a lot of detail about life at a magical college. It came off rather grim and cheerless. The series leaves the school behind pretty quickly, but they make the urgency of defeating the Big Bad part of the reasoning for it. There's a lot of ironic distancing from the magical otherworld in both books and series. The series is more blatantly campy about it.

Buffy had a few good episodes about college early on-there was an actual demon roommate, haunted frat parties, some shitty freshman hazing, and of course the professor who turns out to be a secondary Big Bad-- but then life intervened. I didn't mind that so much--it was at that point less about college as such than making the slow turn into adulthood.

[marycatelli]

hmmmm. . . .

Thinking deep philosophical thoughts.

My own A Diabolical Bargain takes place (mostly) at a wizards' college, and there's a fair amount of college life stuff in it, including the magical.

[telophase]

Right, exactly! It's not a failure of the book if the title/cover is clearly metaphorical...

Tell that to my nine-year-old self who was extremely disappointed by both those books after reading those titles!

[sholio]

Okay, yes, to be fair, my nine-year-old self was too. (Possibly in part because this is an author who DOES have that kind of thing in some of her other books, so it's not unreasonable to expect it!)

[marycatelli]

Yeah. Some consideration has to be given to the target audience's capacity to handle symbolism and metaphor.