Copy This 2-Sentence Premise Formula Before You Write Your Novel

Learn how to craft a clear two-sentence guiding premise to define your story, boost creativity, and stay focused through revisions.

Why You Need to Explain Your Story in Two Sentences

You’ve got an amazing book idea—but if you can’t explain what your story is in two sentences, you don’t actually have a solid story yet.

The authors who can do this are the ones who actually finish drafts. And not just finish them—they finish and revise those drafts faster and more effectively for books readers genuinely want to read. Why? Because they have those two sentences guiding them.

In this article, I’ll show you a simple formula for writing this guiding premise so you can get there too.

Until you reach that level of clarity, you’ll likely stay stuck in the ideas phase—even if that looks like ever-changing drafts—never fully committed to which story you’re telling.

The Danger of Staying in the Idea Phase

In her recent TEDx Talk, “The Art of Discomfort,” author Leigh Bardugo notes that many artists fail before they ever really begin. Too often, the excitement of the idea phase feels comfortable, but making that idea work—and seeing it through to a finishable novel—is not so comfortable.

Bardugo identifies the underlying root cause as an intolerance for the discomfort required to commit to one idea long past its honeymoon phase. This leads writers to chase shiny new ideas instead.

How a Guiding Premise Keeps You Grounded

Your guiding premise forces you to commit to the core driver of your story. It gives you an expectation to meet and helps you push through those less comfortable stages of the novel-writing process.

It won’t save you from discomfort—but it will save you from endlessly rewriting unwieldy material for years.

Without that premise, it’s easy to keep switching to the next “greater” idea when things get difficult. But once you’ve nailed those two sentences, you’ve essentially built a compass for your story—a clear direction you can trust to bring your novel to life.

So, you need to cut to the core of your story’s promise in two sentences, test its capacity for a whole novel, and commit to seeing it through.

That’s what we’ll do right now.

The Simple Formula for a Two-Sentence Guiding Premise

To make it easier to get to two sentences, use this simple formula:

Character (who) + situation (when/where) + goal (what character must do) × why (stakes) = premise

(Yup—"times" for the stakes. Because the stakes aren’t just in addition to the main story elements. They apply to each element.)

You can string those components together in just about any order to create a one- or two-sentence summary. However, I recommend starting with the character as soon as possible. Just like in your story, a reader can’t care about the other pieces until they have a character lens to judge them through.

This gives you the clarity you need to move forward, keeping the core promise of your story front and center—the thing you ultimately need to deliver to your readers.

Breaking It Down

Let’s break that down. And if you don’t know which of your story ideas to work on—or you want to better follow along through this whole process step-by-step with examples, guided prompts, and more guidance on idea selection—you can follow along inside my free Novel Premise Course.

Your guiding premise is basically the concept—the super short summary of what your story is about. It boils a story down to the most essential parts needed to make up a complete narrative.

It answers the journalistic 5 Ws.

So use the who, what, when, where, and why to help you more easily formulate a draft of your guiding premise. Answer these questions:

• Who is the story about?
• What must that character do?
• Where does the action occur?
• When does the story take place?
• Why is the story important (stakes)?

Once you’ve brainstormed your answers to these questions for your story idea, plug them into the formula for a rough, stripped-down summary of your story.

Character (who) + situation (when/where) + goal (what character must do) × why (stakes) = premise

Example: A Romantasy Premise in Action

Let me show you this in practice. For example, I accidentally came up with a nearly complete high-level outline for a romantasy novel in this video: The Exact Beat Sheet That Saves Authors Years of Rewrites, simply from going through my ley line theme process.

And I used my Spellbook Outline template to flesh it out. So if you need more fodder for your idea in the first place—or if you’re struggling to decide which direction to take your idea—that might not be a bad option for you either.

Why the Premise Comes First

Normally, I make writing the guiding premise the first step with authors, from the early planning stages to the late revision stages. But if you haven’t yet grown that initial seed of your story idea far enough to answer the 5 Ws, that’s okay.

Trying anyway is still useful—it shows you what you don’t know yet about your story and helps you brainstorm potential directions.

That said, going through the Spellbook Outline template process is an especially effective way to grow your idea. 

Keep Your Story on Track

Even with the template, you still need this guiding premise to keep your story on track. So next, I’ll show you my process of shaping that romantasy idea into a guiding premise.

Step 1: Start with the Character (Who)

First, I need to establish my protagonist.

My romantasy idea is about Rose. And who is Rose? She’s a callous woman consumed by the grief of losing her husband of many years. Because of that, she now believes it’s better never to love than to suffer loss again.

Step 2: Define the Goal (What Must They Do?)

The goal is the main external plot objective the character must pursue.

For Rose, she must admit her feelings and fight off the invading enemy.

Step 3: Establish the Situation or Context (Where/When)

The situation or context provides the immediate setting or inciting incident that kicks off the main plot conflict.

For Rose, I could say it’s all happening after the loss of her husband and within a dragon-riding battalion when she’s put into command long past her prime and an enemy is invading.

Step 4: Determine the Stakes (Why It Matters)

The stakes—or the “why”—establish the importance of the objective, ideally tying the external and internal consequences together.

So why must Rose admit her feelings and fight off the enemy, and what happens if she fails?

If Rose fails, she’ll doom her own heart and those she never admitted she loved.

Step 5: Assemble the Premise Draft

Finally, it’s time to assemble the components into a one- or two-sentence summary. Start by plugging your answers to the 5 Ws into the formula to get something to work with:

Character (who) + situation (when/where) + goal (what character must do) × why (stakes) = premise

Here’s my rough draft:

Callous Rose + in command of a dragon battalion long past her prime during an enemy invasion + must admit her feelings and fight off the enemy x or doom her own heart and those she never admitted she loved.

And that’s the starting point—a crude but basically complete premise that captures the external conflict and necessary story elements.

Refining the Guiding Premise

Then I can put it into sentence structure from there with a little more finesse. That might look like this:

After the loss of her husband, callous Rose is put in command in a dragon-riding battalion during an enemy invasion. But if Rose can’t acknowledge her feelings, she’ll doom her own heart—and the officer and dragon she never admitted she loved.

Even in this initial guiding premise draft, I already have more clarity about what this story really is. It forces structure onto the idea and defines the emotional and external stakes.

Why Two Sentences Matter

But I know—boiling your entire novel down to two sentences might still feel impossible.

For most of the sci-fi and fantasy writers I’ve worked with, this is the hardest part. They struggle to explain their epic worlds and complex conflicts that concisely, no matter how hard they try.

They feel they need more space to explain everything, so their “guiding premise” turns into a jacket copy–length paragraph instead. That’s nice to have—but it’s not as useful for our purpose here: crafting a guiding premise that will actually guide your story and revision decisions.

What’s Really Going On When It Feels Impossible

If this is you right now—if there’s just so much more to your story you feel needs to be captured than two sentences can hold—the reality is that this is probably your fear talking.

Or, quite equally possible, it’s that intolerance for discomfort—especially if you’re realizing you don’t yet know how to pin your story down in these two sentences, even with a formula.

You might be afraid to commit to one main thing in your story. Or you might be afraid that this story you love will appear too crude when brought into the light—without all the cool little details you dreamed up for it.

Without the full context, you might wonder: How will anyone understand how awesome it all is in my head?

Or underneath all that… what if by making it this real, your nebulous story no longer has the endless possibility of being a risk-free, exciting idea?

Now, it has form and clarity. It’s something closer to being finished—something that could be judged. Something that could fail.

The Power of the Two-Sentence Shift

When this happens with the authors I coach, it’s a clear sign that they need this step, even if it’s uncomfortable. Because it tells me the story isn’t clear enough yet—not for them, and not enough to meet reader expectations.

That’s exactly why this exercise matters. The discomfort is the signal that you’re finally moving from “idea” to story.

I see this shift all the time: once an author can fit the whole story into two precise sentences, that’s the sweet spot. That’s when they know exactly what they’re promising—and what their story needs to do.

There’s a reason this super-short guiding premise works so well.

Why the Guiding Premise Works (According to Brain Science)

We know from brain science that defining a problem—which can look like outlining or following story structure—is necessary for the creative solutions that solve that problem.

In our case, we’re defining a story through its guiding premise.

The process of creativity in the brain involves a dynamic interplay between two key systems:

• The Default Mode Network (DMN) – your spontaneous idea generator, where imagination and daydreaming take the lead.
• The Executive Control Network (ECN) – the organizer that focuses, evaluates, and directs those ideas into structure.

The initial “idea phase,” like the story seed I talked about in a previous article, is primarily the DMN at work. But when you push yourself to formalize that idea into a concise guiding premise, you’re activating the ECN to define the problem parameters.

This foundational work creates boundaries that prevent your brain from constantly starting over—a key obstacle to moving past the messy middle.

How Defining the Premise Boosts Creativity

By starting with this definition, you actually free up your daydreamer brain (the DMN) and your language networks for a faster, smoother drafting experience.

This strategic constraint—the commitment to your premise—forces your brain to form new and unlikely connections while plotting, which is what actually makes your story more creative.

Constraint is not limitation—it necessitates creativity!

Once you know what your story is promising—its core driver type, its genre, and its tone—you can deliver on those promises more effectively and more creatively than if you hadn’t defined them tightly in the first place.

Having this guiding premise works with your brain’s natural processes, helping you overcome that initial discomfort of turning your idea into something tangible and real. It becomes your story’s lodestone—the test you can use to guide future creative decisions and keep your narrative focused.

What Comes Next

So once you’ve got your two-sentence premise—or even if you’re close but not quite there yet—how do you know when it’s clear enough?

And how can you test whether it truly proves your idea is strong enough to carry an entire novel?

That’s what I’m breaking down in the next article.

Selected Bibliography

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6869990/
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...;
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36240723/
• https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/handbook-of-creativity/biological-bases-of-creativity/168E9A9890C346E71F2D9820AAE5A518
• https://www.nature.com/article...;
• psypost.org/neuroscience-sheds-light-on-brain-mechanisms-underlying-exceptional-creativity/

This field is quite theoretical. I'm extrapolating for authors what I can based on the findings we do have (and I'm certainly not a neuroscientist!). To explore a fuller background, you can see this article about a breadth of brain science sources (and their abstracts/descriptions) in my site's private resource library. Note: You'll need to register a free student account to access it: https://www.inkybookwyrm.com/blog/sources-on-the-science-of-story-craft-and-creativity

Categories: : creativity, novel drafting, novel planning, outlining, self-editing, writer mindset