Why Your Story Idea Isn’t Enough to Write a Novel That Works

Gina Kammer Author

Oct 22, 2025 |

Learn how to turn your raw sci-fi or fantasy idea into a guiding premise that builds a strong, marketable novel.

When Brilliant Story Ideas Fizzle Out

You can have a dozen amazing ideas for sci-fi and fantasy novels—but if you can’t get past page 50, those ideas aren’t doing their job. The truth is, most ideas fizzle out because they were never built to sustain a full story.

In this article, I’ll show you how to stop chasing shiny new ideas and start shaping one that can actually carry a novel from first draft to publishable book.

If that sounds familiar—too many ideas, stuck by chapter three, not sure which one’s worth your time—you’re in plenty of company.

These are the majority of the sci-fi and fantasy drafts that land on my desk for editing: pages full of potential, but no clear story promise tying it all together.

The Common Trap: Too Many Ideas, No Core Story

One author in that same spot had written everything plus the kitchen sink into his manuscript. This manuscript had been in varying stages of completion several times over.

But he knew it wasn’t working like that, and, worse, it wasn’t the story he imagined it could be.

His problem was that before diving into drafting, he had never taken one of the simplest steps to make sure that his awesome idea was honed into something novel-worthy.

(And I’m not talking about outlining.)

When I showed him how to take a step back to validate his idea in the first place, he finally understood what this story needed to be. And that gave him the foundation to finish a draft that worked.

Most novels don’t fail in the drafting phase—they fail long before that, when we skip the step that proves whether an idea can actually hold up as a story.

Why Inspiration Isn’t Enough

As creatives, and likely neurospicy ones at that, we often react impulsively to our lightning-strike ideas. That instant excitement causes us to chase them immediately.

After all, the consequences if we don’t are ruthless—because that idea may never exist again. We know we need to start writing before the awesome strike of inspiration disappears!

But a strong story isn’t built only on excitement, no matter how cool the idea. Because an idea alone is missing half the creative process—the structure and evaluation of your brain’s Executive Control Network (ECN) on all that inspiration coming out of the Default Mode Network (DMN).

An idea is just raw potential. It’s not yet the foundation of a story—it’s only the seed.

Sure, you can grow it through brainstorming in draft form five times over, just like many of the authors I’ve worked with.

But when you’re growing a mass of tendrils in every direction, and you don’t know where the roots are anymore, it’s impossible to find the real story through that tangle.

You end up stuck at chapter three—or in never-ending rewrites—because you never took that pause to figure out the actual foundation for your story.

The Missing Step Before You Draft

That’s why before you outline or draft anything, you need one deceptively simple checkpoint to see what story that idea is really promising, and a way to validate whether your idea can sustain a full novel.

It’s the first step I use with the authors in my Enchant Your Readers book coaching program, and it starts with writing what I call a guiding premise.

What Is a Guiding Premise?

A guiding premise is a short statement that makes your idea tangible. It names who this story is about, what they must do, and why it matters—while promising the tone, genre, age category, and the core conflict driver readers expect this book to deliver.

What it does for you is even more important: it gives you a direction that holds up.

• It tells you what the story must actually deliver to readers—mystery or pursuit, siege or heist; hopeful or dark; YA or adult.
• It keeps you from kitchen-sink drafting by catching shiny new ideas before they hijack the book.
• It makes outlining and self-editing faster because you know exactly what belongs and what doesn’t.
• And it gives you peace of mind that the book you’re writing is the book you’re promising—to yourself, to agents, and to readers.

That’s why this is the first checkpoint I use with authors in Enchant Your Readers: we make the idea concrete, market-aware, and testable before thousands of words go on the page.

From Story Seed to Story Foundation

So how do we do that?

First, we take that idea—that seed of a story—and use it to figure out what might really be behind it. What that story actually is.

Now, a story seed can come from anywhere:

• A vivid image
• A setting
• A “what-if”
• A character voice
• A moral question
• Even a single line of dialogue

Those sparks are exciting, but they’re also slippery. They vanish or morph just as fast as they appear, which is why so many ideas end up buried in the someday graveyard—because they have no real form yet as a story.

The truth is… a story seed isn’t a story.

It seems like it should be obvious, but I think the reason it’s not so obvious is because—well—what’s a story, really? It’s hard to give story-form to your idea if you don’t know what the thing is that you’re trying to achieve.

So What Is a Story, Really?

I’ve worked for years on trying to hone a satisfactory definition. I’m not sure I’m there yet, but so far most of the too-simplified definitions I’ve seen simply don’t do justice to the portals into other lives, experiences, and emotional torture we experience as readers at the “hands” (pages?) of a book.

What I’ve found to be more helpful is to understand what a story does.

A story isn’t just what happens or who it happens to. A story is all about the whys.

Fiction gives us clarity on our own lives and the world, helping us to see the bigger picture. Stories make order out of chaos. And I’ve devoted a whole lot of time and effort into researching how that happens.

So here’s how I’ve defined story:

A story is a curated collection of words conveying a point—a purpose or message—through the conflict that drives a character and the reasons for the character’s decisions in the face of situations that constantly challenge the character to change for the better (whether or not the character does).

A story is that chain of cause and effect driven by character decisions, actions, and consequences, all moving toward something that changes both the protagonist and, perhaps, the reader.

And so that’s what we’re trying to achieve in writing a story. An idea doesn’t automatically contain all that—it’s raw material without direction. Until you make it tangible and test whether it can sustain that chain, it’s just potential energy waiting to fizzle out. Understanding story in this way helps you create a guiding premise.

Expanding the Seed

To do so, you can expand on that seed you first had for your story. Work with the processes of creativity by first thinking really hard on that story idea.

Get your brain focusing on it and why that particular seed struck you. Why might it be important, compelling, or impossible for you to let go of?

Then you might need to do something else for a while to let the more creative Default Mode Network (DMN) of your brain do its less conscious thing. So go for that walk or do something a bit mindless. It’s OK—it’s actually productive.

Because then the salience network can help you see what’s of relevance there, eventually giving you that aha moment of insight on what this idea is really about for you.

Somewhere around that idea, there’s something worth it to you—and you need that, because a novel is no small project.

Make sure there’s something to this idea that can sustain you for the long haul.

That’s why you need a way to validate your idea before you pour months into drafting. You can strengthen the seed—expand on the “what-if,” pair it with a character goal, or explore the emotion it stirs—but even the strongest idea doesn’t guarantee a marketable book.

To validate it, it first has to be crystallized into a guiding premise—a short statement that defines your story’s purpose, tone, and promise to the reader.

Your Guiding Premise as Creative Compass

When it comes to writing your book, a guiding premise lets you off the hook from having to do everything for everyone.

It tells you what your story must deliver—the conflict driver, the tone, the age category, even the emotional flavor that defines your genre.

It becomes a compass for every choice you make while drafting, keeping you grounded in exactly what this particular story is when new ideas appear.

Of course, I’m always an advocate for capturing any of those juicy new ideas so all the other stuff going on in your brain doesn’t just dogpile on it, never to let it resurface in the same way again.

Save it for later, feeling confident in knowing when it’s not meant for your current story. You can do that when you have a concise statement of your story’s promises to keep you on track without throwing every spark of inspiration into it.

Trust the Process (and the Sparks)

But that doesn’t mean those sparks won’t come in handy later! So let that be OK. Trust that you can use your creativity to give this story what it needs without jumping on every spark.

Because with a guiding premise, you’ll be able to record those shiny new ideas somewhere without having to brainstorm-draft an entire eighty thousand words from each of them immediately.

Most importantly, having this premise allows you to validate your current story before you write thousands of words for one that won’t hold together.

What’s not doing authors any favors is when, rather than capturing an idea for further evaluation, they jump headlong into drafting the novel before they even know if they really have a story.

With the authors I work with, this premise is the first step we take to ensure a story is not only writable but marketable.

It guides everything that follows—the core conflict, the story’s flavor, the tone, and the expectations your reader will carry through the entire book.

Your readers deserve that level of intention. They deserve stories built on foundations that were tested and chosen—not written as a brainstorm on impulse alone.

Before You Write Another Word

So before you outline or revise another word, take that pause to validate your idea.

That single step separates authors who finish strong, publishable novels from those who can’t get beyond stuck-in-draft phase.

To do that, you need to write your guiding premise in no more than two sentences. Otherwise, you risk sliding right back into chasing an idea rather than finishing your story.

And that’s exactly what I'll teach you in the next article.

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/b...

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