The Blueprint That Turns an Awesome Premise into a Marketable Novel

A guide to crafting stronger story premises by overcoming idea attachment, clarifying your core narrative, and using feedback to refine your novel.

Using Your Guiding Premise to Shape a Marketable Story

By writing your novel’s guiding premise, you’ve already taken the first step I walk every author through to validate that their idea is strong and clarify what the story is at its core.

But if you’re serious about turning that idea into a truly marketable book, the real shift comes next—using that premise to focus your draft and guide your revisions so the story actually delivers on what it promises.

So I’m going to show you how my coaching clients ensure their stories make good on their promises to readers by first knowing which of two premise types they’ve actually written: aspirational or reflective.

Because it’s possible to write a tight, two-sentence guiding premise that captures the story you want to tell but still end up with a draft that doesn’t actually deliver on that promise.

This is when you can end up stuck in the never-ending edit stage, unsure if you're making your manuscript better—or only making it different—because you don't know what your story truly needs.

When the Premise Doesn’t Match the Draft

An author in my Enchant Your Readers book coaching program, Alex, had a solid story. But it wasn’t fully connecting with readers. One of the main issues, as we discovered, was this exact gap between what the story promised in its pitch and what it delivered on the page.

The premise refinement work revealed a heavy emotional undercurrent driving his assassin protagonist. On the page, however, it was heavier on the in-the-moment action and light on the deeper motivations really at work—the things that really make readers care.

How Refining the Premise Transformed the Story

Now, Alex has revised his manuscript to deliver on the promises of his super-tight premise:

“When Mary, an assassin who’s abandoned her clan, seeks to fix the mistakes of her past, she’s instead pulled hundreds of years to the future to join the resistance and fight against the tyranny of a king she once called friend.”

Encapsulated in one sentence, even a complete stranger can tell so much about this story. Genre, tone, and conflict type. We’ve got the sci-fi time-travel promise, and the fight against a tyrannical king.

More importantly, we know why it all matters. We know Mary has abandoned her clan, which creates an inherent tension already. And we can easily infer that she’s driven by guilt since she’s trying to rectify her mistakes.

In some cases, that might even be enough of the theme woven into the premise to make readers care. But Alex takes it one step further with that gut-punch closing: the conflict is personal to Mary. It’s one of betrayal by a friend.

Aspirational vs. Reflective Premises in Practice

While his premise wasn’t always this tight, Alex still started with a great aspirational premise—the story he intended to write. But when we first looked at his opening chapters, they didn’t show Mary’s guilt in the same emotional gut-punchy way.

So we used that aspirational premise to guide his revision to make sure it did. Now he can feel confident that his premise reflects what’s also on the page.

As he moves toward publication, Alex is thinking ahead with this premise to how it can become the core of marketing copy or pitch materials for agents. And you can do the same, especially when you can follow up and deliver on that premise promise in your manuscript.

What Comes Next

The first step to do that is to identify which type of premise you’ve written for your story:

The Reflective Premise

The Reflective Premise is the brutally honest premise that reflects the story you currently have on the page. This one is useful once you’ve got a draft of your story, or even a detailed plan.

If it’s truly accurate, it’s going to help you see whether you’ve ended up with what you wanted your story to be or not. Therefore, it can show you exactly where you need to revise.

The Aspirational Premise

The Aspirational Premise is the polished premise that reflects the story you want to tell—the one infused with your deepest “why” (your story’s Ley Line truth). In it, you show everything as tight and connected. It all matters to the protagonist. And, because of that, it will matter to your readers as well.

This premise is useful even at the brainstorming stage, but it’s also crucial in revision. It helps you know what will improve your manuscript and bring it closer to your true vision.

How These Two Premises Work Together

When you wrote and refined your two-sentence premise earlier in this series, you likely created an aspirational premise—a clear statement of the story you intend to write. It’s the version that captures your core idea, your deeper thematic truth, and the emotional motivation of your character.

It will be your guide as you plan and draft your idea into a story.

Once it’s written, it’s time to write an objective reflective premise to help you identify gaps between what’s on the page and what you aspire to—what you want your story to deliver.

If it matches what you intend, your story may already be doing its job. If not, you need to further refine.

This becomes your high-level blueprint for getting your story into publishable shape.

Why Objective Reflection Is So Hard

But this is really hard to do objectively. It’s difficult to see what’s actually there on the page and reflect it accurately yourself. You know what you imagine the story to be in your head, and it’s not always possible to see whether that’s coming across through what you’ve written.

That’s why in Enchant Your Readers, I build a dedicated section of critique partnering into the revision process. My Critique Partner Program is also a separate program you can join for training to give and receive effective feedback with a built-in community of sci-fi and fantasy authors.

How Professional Feedback Fills the Gap

But in Enchant Your Readers, I provide direct, professional feedback to each author so they know exactly what their draft does and doesn’t contain—and therefore, what it still needs.

I give them the brain science-backed blueprint from planning and drafting through revising in supporting tools, courses, and workbooks to take them step-by-step through the process to get that story idea to a marketable book.

They don’t have to rely on their own objectivity. They don’t have to do it alone.

Strengthening the Aspirational Premise From the Start

We always rework the aspirational premise together from the start—often several times—to get it into the strongest shape. Because that premise seed needs to be strong to expand from an idea or to guide an existing draft into a strong story that enchants readers.

That level of feedback really hones not just the premise but the whole story by proxy.

It also helps authors get over mental hurdles—like the attachments we all develop to certain ideas or pieces of our own stories, even if they don’t actually work.

Even in my premise example about Rose, which I only created for example purposes in these videos, I realized I had certain attachments I didn’t want to let go of, even though they maybe weren’t allowing me to hypothetically shape the best story.

Why Letting Go of Ideas Is So Hard for Writers

I guess it’s because as authors, we’re creators, and ideas are dopamine. And we love them. It’s hard to let go once the idea has planted emotional roots in us.

This phenomenon is tied to loss aversion and the “endowment effect” in psychology, where people overvalue things (including ideas) simply because they are theirs. Or perhaps it’s the “creativity effect,” where creators are especially prone to overvaluing their intellectual or creative products, likely also due to the level of effort it took—creating more attachment and leading to inflexibility in changing or abandoning those ideas, even when it would be rational or optimal to do so.

It’s all too wrapped up in loss aversion—when giving up an idea feels like a loss, which is emotionally painful. We’re too attached because ideas become like extensions of ourselves, which associates them with our identity, and that might be the single most powerful piece of this.

Or, perhaps especially for ADHD writers, the idea can be the easy part, but trying to switch into the Executive Control Network to analyze and refine that idea is the hard part. ADHD brains might respond more to immediate rewards (the idea itself) and less to delayed rewards (the improved draft after hard revision). There’s a preference for open, unstructured idea generation and a motivational drop-off when moving to the evaluation, selection, or discarding stages. Or the “intolerance for discomfort” that Leigh Bardugo presented her TEDx talk on.

Psychological Phenomena Behind Idea Attachment

• Endowment Effect: Overvaluing what we “own” or have created
• Creativity Effect: Creators value their ideas more than outsiders
• Loss Aversion: Letting go feels more painful than gaining something new
• Effort Justification: More effort, more attachment, harder to let go
• Attachment Theory / Overvalued Ideas: Ideas become extensions of self, associated with identity

Mechanisms and Their Effects on Writers

• Dopamine / reward from ideas: Pleasure, novelty-seeking, fixation
• Attachment / endowment effect: Emotional resistance to discarding ideas
• Loss aversion: Overvaluing original ideas, avoidance of change
• ADHD novelty / reward sensitivity: More idea generation, less refinement or flexibility
• Mind wandering & emotional rehearsal: Strengthening the “bond” to the initial idea

In other words, there’s a lot of scientific evidence for why it’s so hard to “kill our darlings” even when doing so would improve our stories.

How This Showed Up in My "Rose" Example

Anyway, with my "Rose" example, I was really enamored with this idea that this older woman who can’t move on even years after her husband’s death finally does something rash for herself. Rose just up and decides to join the dangerous dragon-riding battalion to feel alive again. To fly and fight and avoid real connections because she doesn’t think it’s necessary as a soldier.

Now, there’s not actually anything wrong with that motivation, but I’m always looking to write the tightest possible story. And it’s hard for me to admit that maybe that sudden shift for her—hook-y though it is for the start of the novel—doesn’t help connect Rose’s external goals back in all that well.

It maybe isn’t quite enough on its own to be plausible. It also didn’t make it very clear what the core of this story would be without it all pulled more tightly together.

Why Tightening Your Story’s Core Motivation Matters

So I had some resistance about building in more of a tight connection there, such as making the enemy responsible for her husband's death or making her also really passionate about protecting her homeland from invasion. And that could well be in addition to her initial motivation of really just being fed up with not really feeling alive after her husband’s death.

But now it would show where the idea to join the battalion comes in when Rose was otherwise not the fighting type.

So… I could have really used a coach to push me on that idea just like I do for the authors I coach. This is the kind of work that takes more feedback for refinement to push authors more than they could push themselves on their own.

When a Premise Won’t Fit Into One or Two Sentences

This is similar to when authors can’t figure out how to get their premise down to one or two sentences and insist they need more to make it all make sense more tightly. Except they’re justifying the opposite. In every instance, it’s meant the story was still muddled not only at the premise level, but also at the draft level.

Once we continued working on the premise, and therefore also the story, we were able to cut through to the core of what was really there, what it was really about, and what that core story promise was, which made it so much stronger and solid than having these extraneous limbs taking it off balance.

It doesn’t mean these authors couldn’t do all the complex, epic stuff or layer all the depth into their story, but they were finally clear on what all those pieces were really doing in the story and how to make them work even harder for greater impact—and sometimes, yeah, then we knew what was chaff to cut, too.

Why Feedback Helps You Overcome Resistance

But they didn’t get over that mental hurdle, that initial resistance, without that feedback. Without being pushed to do so.

Through that feedback together, they could come to let go or reconsider without as much sting. At least, their renewed excitement in their story’s potential softened the bite, I suppose.

Working with professional feedback was always the missing piece, the thing that kept pushing them to get their premise—and story—there… or they would have stopped at mediocre.

Don’t get me wrong! Perfectionism is still impossible, but it’s too true that we sometimes default to taking the easy way out when something is seemingly good enough. Or because we got too attached to an earlier idea. Or… when we’re not brave enough to dig back in again because imposter syndrome and all the insidious whispers that we’re not good enough sometimes backfires the usual perfectionistic tendencies.

It sounds backward, and it is, but you’ve probably experienced this side of it too—where it makes you cling to that old idea in a feeble attempt to justify that it is good enough. Because if you have to refine it, if it wasn’t perfect on the first try, maybe just maybe that means you actually aren’t good enough. And you don’t want to look that in the face…

Brains, Self-Sabotage, and the Work Worth Doing

Oh, we have a whole lot of fun thoughts to contend with, don’t we? Yay. Brains. So much potential and instead we use its energy by letting it run amok with our self-sabotage. (I feel like this should have been a quote of Marvin the Paranoid Android somehow…)

But this premise work is one of those things that it’s worth it to be pushed harder on because it has effects that make waves throughout the whole story.

And isn’t that why we’re doing this? We want those amazing books that leave us in awe—over those that leave us mostly apathetic. So if you’re going to publish this novel, you owe it to your future readers to validate, sharpen, and hone your premise.

How I Help Authors Do Exactly That

And that’s what I’ll help you do in my book coaching program for science fiction and fantasy novelists, Enchant Your Readers. Just like your characters have to fight their inner demons, we’ll fight yours as their writer/creator too. And we’ll do it all while honing your craft so you can execute your ideas in the way you imagine for them.

But spots are always very limited, so if you are serious about finally publishing this story you’ve been brainstorming, go to enchantyourreaders.com now.

Selected Bibliography

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7543022/
• https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251012054608.htm
• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/role-of-psychological-strengths-in-positive-life-outcomes-in-adults-with-adhd/69B7CE4D4D9F370214929ABF53701567
• https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/lossaversionpnas.pdf
• https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/creativity-effect

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, self-editing, writer mindset