Every story starts with a promise to your reader. This promise, a snippet in your opening pages, tells the reader the shape of your story and sets their expectations.
For example, if your protagonist starts off as a grey mouse, someone who lets things happen and allows others to decide about their life, then your story’s promise is that your protagonist will learn how to gain agency and take control of their life. If, on the other hand, your protagonist starts off as someone who’s completely self-sufficient and doesn’t want to depend on others or make themselves vulnerable, your story’s promise indicates they will learn how to open up, ask for help and trust others. In short, the story’s promise is a mirror image of your ending that presents the reader with the key elements of your story.
In practice, this means that the story’s promise helps the reader understand:
- your protagonist’s goal/wish
- the main obstacle to achieving it
- how your character will grow and change throughout the story.
A lot depends on your genre. A love story/romance, for example, promises a happy ending. No matter what troubles and differences plague the two main characters, the reader knows that they’ll end up together. If you don’t deliver on it, you’ll likely end up with a bunch of angry and disappointed readers who feel cheated by the lack of ‘happily ever after’.
A detective/crime story is a whole different fish. It promises several things: a mystery and its resolution, a fair display of all the clues needed to solve the puzzle and that in the end, the bad guys will get caught or at least reprimanded, and order will be restored. Having said that, there are great books like Thomas Harris’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’, where the villain gets away, but the ending still delivers an emotional payoff for the reader. There are, however, very few authors and stories that can pull this off.
Lastly, there’s the less explicit promise that the protagonist won’t die. Unless you’re writing a tragedy, that is. Since readers invest hours of their precious time to spend it with your hero and root for them, they’ll likely feel cheated if you kill them off.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole list of books that break that rule. Among those that do and get away with it (hello, spoiler alerts!) are Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, ‘Romeo & Juliet’, Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’, John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’, Eleanor Coerr’s ‘Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes’, Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’ and Emily Koch’s ‘If I Die Before I Wake’. Each of these stories paves the way towards the ending so that the hero’s death is expected and logical. Again, try this at your own risk.
Putting genre conventions aside, your story’s promise must be stated at the very beginning of your novel. You can deliver it by answering the following key questions:
- What does your protagonist want and why?
- What’s standing in their way?
- What does your protagonist think will happen next?
- What does the reader think will happen next?
The opening pages of your novel must contain answers to the first and second question. The third and fourth question help the author create suspense and make sure the reader wants to know what happens next.
So, what is your story’s promise? Let me know in the comments!
