Premise Palooza! Generating Great Story Ideas

by Julie Phend

What’s a Premise Palooza?

Premise Palooza is a fun idea for creating unique story concepts invented by my critique group: authors Kara Laughlin, Joyana McMahon, Amy Thernstrom, and myself, Julie Phend.  

Last December, we were all completing long-term projects. This can be a discouraging time for a writer—after years of commitment to a novel-in-progress, your heart can sink if you’re not sure what to tackle next. So we decided to skip traditional critiques that month and concentrate on creating memorable story premises. Our quest became Premise Palooza.

How Does Premise Palooza Work?

In fiction, a premise is defined as a one-sentence story concept that includes a protagonist, a goal, and a situation. For our challenge, we agreed to do the following:

• Spend 15 minutes each day brainstorming premises. 
• Not censor any ideas.
• At the end of the month, choose our 10 most promising ideas and write a pitch paragraph for each.

To keep ourselves accountable and bolster morale, we emailed weekly to report our progress. We had some good laughs as we shared a few of our zanier ideas.

Each week, we took turns being in charge of prompts to stimulate creative thinking. We found three techniques to be particularly useful. Here’s how they worked:

Daily Prompts: 

Each night, the prompter sent three random prompts, which could be used together, separately, or not at all.

Examples:

• A gummy advent calendar, A cross-country train car, Mardi Gras
•  A secret underwater laboratory, Enemies forced to work together,    National Pun-off
•  New Year’s Eve, An abandoned mine shaft, A secret

Prompts became especially helpful as the month went on and our personal idea wells began to dry up. We discovered that a prompt generated by someone else often sends you in a direction you would never have gone on your own.

A Page from Julie's Notebook

Borrowed Premises: 

Here, the challenge was to take classic premises from books or movies and retell or update them. This strategy yielded some great story ideas.   

Examples:

• An update of the Scarlet Letter where a kid is forced to wear a C for cheating

• A Christmas picture book based on Elf in which the family dog (instead of the baby) climbs into Santa’s sack. 
  

 

Chain Premises:  

This technique involved taking an existing premise—either our own or someone else’s—and changing one element at a time, resulting in a long list of permutations.

 We all liked this exercise and were often surprised at where we ended up. We felt it really pushed us to be creative—and it was fun because it produced new ideas quickly.

Amy shared a chain sequence that began with a borrowed premise. She said, “My 11-year-old son helped me brainstorm. We wrote down absolutely anything that came to our heads, no matter how silly, as you can see by the examples below.”  

(The premises marked with an asterisk * were generated by Amy’s son.) The original idea comes from “Robbie,” a short story by Isaac Asimov.

1.     Asimov’s premise: Busy parents hire a robot babysitter—but worry when the child gets too attached.

2.     Busy parents hire a robot bodyguard, but worry when the bodyguard turns out to be a coward.

3.     Busy parents hire a robot bodyguard, but worry when the child destroys him during a temper tantrum.*

4.     Busy parents hire a dragon babysitter, but worry when the child gets scared.*

5.     Busy parents hire a dragon babysitter, but worry when the child starts breathing fire.

6.     Busy parents hire an alien babysitter, but worry when the child starts growing a third eye.*

7.     Busy parents hire an alien cook, but worry about the ingredients of the food.

8.     Busy parents hire a dragon cook, but worry when the food is charred.

9.     A kid and his parents are kidnapped by a dragon and forced to babysit a dragonet.*

10.  A kid and his parents are hired by Santa Claus to babysit the elves.*

Testing our Ideas:

At the end of the month, we each wrote pitches for our most promising ideas and gave each other feedback. We also shared them with the children in our lives and asked which stories they’d most like to read. It was fascinating to learn which premises children of different ages liked and why.

Was it Successful?

Amy Thernstrom

I asked the group to comment on their Premise Palooza experience.

Amy: There was something magical about putting all other writing aside and focusing exclusively on generating premises for a solid month. I wrote more than I ever thought possible. 

Kara Laughlin

Kara: It kept me writing during a time of year that typically sees me away from my desk.

Joyana: It was fun to focus on exercising the idea-generating part of my brain without inhibitions. No idea was a bad one during the process.

Joyana Peters McMahon

Julie: I’ve always been a writer who grabbed the first idea that came into my head. This challenge pushed me to stretch my thinking and become more creative.   

Brainstorming premises is clearly a lot of fun. But does it yield valid story ideas?

We all felt that it did. Two of us are currently writing stories based on the challenge, and we’re all excited to have to have a well of story ideas to draw from when we need them.

Julie Phend

Overall, Premise Palooza was great fun, freed our creativity, bonded our group, and generated a ton of ideas—all during the usually less-productive month of December.

Try It!  

So, if you’re looking for a way to spark your creativity, grab a group of friendly writers and organize your own Premise Palooza. Maybe a Pandemic Premise Palooza is in your future.

 

No More Waiting for Wait, Rest, Pause

by Sue Heavenrich

Wait, Rest, Pause is a book worth waiting for. And today we get to find out more about it from the author -

Wait. What's that? Sorry, folks. We have to wait just 3 more lines because - Announcement!  Cathy Ballou Mealey has won the tote from Teresa Robeson. Cathy - please send a PM to Kathy Halsey. Now back to our regularly scheduled blogpost...

What do you do when you need a book – but there isn’t anything published yet? If you’re Marcie Flinchum Atkins, you write the one you need. While teaching fourth grade, she found herself searching for a book about dormancy. You know: that stage trees go through in winter, volcanoes go through when they aren’t blowing their tops, the stage some insects and amphibians overwinter in.

So four and a half years ago, Marcie began scribbling a draft for that book. At the same time she was (as she recalls) knee deep in moving across the state, selling her house – and buying a new one, not to mention interviewing for a new job. But she managed to share her story with critique partners and submitted it to a number of agents, reaping a basket full of rejections.

Then she put it away for a while. Tucked it into a safe spot where it could… go dormant. Wait. Rest. Nap. Then in March of 2018, Millbrook Press put out a call for manuscripts. Marcie nudged her manuscript awake, helped it shake the sleep out of its eyes, and sent it off to the editor.

How fitting that next week, her book Wait, Rest, Pause: Dormancy in Nature hits the shelves. It is a lyrical book – you can see immediately when you read the first page:

If you were dormant, you would pause—
waiting,
   resting,

      huddling,
         curling,
            napping.

The book is also filled with verbs. Not all that surprising, since Marcie focused on verbs in her fourth-grade classroom. As a teacher she told students to “Highlight your verbs!” Because verbs make our writing stronger, she says. A fan of word banks, Marcie often jots the verbs from a story-in-progress on a separate page, then eliminates the weak verbs.

“You want to look for specificity and readability,” she says. She’ll also list other categories of words, such as colors. “I use a lot of dictionaries and thesauruses to make sure I find the right words.” She’s posted some examples of this on her website, where she shares tips with other writers.

The process doesn’t end once the book is accepted by an editor, either. From book title to words on the page, Marcie said she found herself making plenty of tweaks to the language.

“Sometimes a slight change in order makes all the difference,” she says. Sometimes it’s finding a new way to say the same thing. For example, Marcie wanted to use the word “antifreeze” to describe how insects survive freezing temperatures. “But it’s not very lyrical, so I tried to figure out how else to say it, in a better way.”

Titles undergo scrutiny as well. Marcie’s original title was Pause: Dormancy in Nature. But when said aloud, some people heard “paws”…  and that was confusing. So the editor asked if Marcie could come up with a title that would reflect the lyrical nature of the text. To help her think up titles, Marcie wrote keywords on index cards.

There was one little thing Marcie wouldn’t budge on. “I wasn't willing to give up the word dormancy in the subtitle. As a teacher and now librarian, I knew having a subtitle that really shows what the book is about was important.” Fortunately, the editors agreed.

Luscious language is just one of the things I love about Wait, Rest, Pause. I like that Marcie has back matter for curious kids, older siblings, parents, teachers – anyone who wants to learn more about sleeping through the cold season. This makes it a great resource for older elementary school children who are looking for an understanding of what happens in the natural world when it’s too cold for sap to flow or ladybugs to fly.

“I hope my book makes kids curious enough to want to learn more,” Marcie said. “I see it as a springboard for inquiry.”

Thank you, Marcie, for talking shop with us today on GROG. Wait, Rest, Pause officially releases on Sept. 3 - just six short days from now.
Find out more about Marcie over at her website. Check out my review of Wait, Rest, Pause here, and  Jenna Grodzicki's interview with Marcie from July over at the Lerner blog.

Annette Pimentel on Scaffolding the Past for Young Readers

our guest author, Annette Pimentel

by Sue Heavenrich, with Annette Pimentel

Last fall I reviewed Annette Pimentel's book, Mountain Chef, a wild tale of a cook in the Sierra mountains. I loved the story and the extensive back matter, and was amazed at how Annette did her magic. She graciously accepted our invitation to write a guest post for the GROG. And now I'll turn it over to...

Annette Pimentel

In the picture book biographies I write, I need to accurately recreate yesterday’s world for my young readers. Only when kids understand how things used to be can they see how a true-life hero transformed society. So, in every book I face the challenge of building a scaffold of knowledge about the past to support my reader’s understanding.

First, I need to decide what is important for my reader to understand. I think about assumptions kids make about their world—that girls and boys both play sports, for example. I try to figure out what essential elements of the world I’m writing about kids won’t already be familiar with.

Once I know what gaps I need to fill, it’s time to build that scaffold.

I’ve learned important scaffolding skills from mentor texts. Here are strategies that ensure kids get the background knowledge they need.

Strategy # 1: STOP THE ACTION AND EXPLAIN

If only I could just stop everything and give kids the background they need! Usually that would be death to a story but occasionally it actually works.

Freedom in Congo Square depicts the joyful Sunday music and dance of enslaved people in New Orleans. But with a topic like that, there is the danger that young readers will fail to understand that those were stolen moments within a life of oppression. So before the book even starts, a Foreword tackles the issue of slavery.

Lines, Bars and Circles: How William Playfair Invented Graphs tells the story of a thinker who emerged during the Industrial Revolution. Rather than try to explain the significance of the Industrial Revolution within the story, the information is placed in a sidebar. The reader can drop out of the story for a moment, read, the information, then get back to the story with the knowledge she needs.

Strategy #2: GIVE NECESSARY KNOWLEDGE IN TERMS OF THE MAIN CHARACTER’S LIFE

Handily, you can often build your scaffolding as you describe your main character since the information your reader needs probably relates to that main character’s passions and desires.

Martin’s Dream Day gives kids information about the state of civil rights in the US in 1963 by explaining Martin Luther King’s convictions:

Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in equality. For everyone—not just a few. He wanted all people to have the full rights of citizenship. That meant the right to vote, to go to school, and to get a job. In the 1960s, African Americans did not have these basic rights.

I used the same strategy in Mountain Chef. I needed to explain to kids the ugly realities facing Chinese Americans after the passage of racist laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, so I described how my hero ended up in his job as a gourmet trail cook:

Bosses paid Chinese workers less than white workers….Most people with Chinese names ended up cooking in restaurants or washing clothes in laundries. Tie Sing, though, had…dreams as big as the country he loved. Cramped shacks weren’t for him.

Strategy #3: SHOW KIDS SOMETHING THEY RECOGNIZE, AND THEN UNDERLINE THE DIFFERENCES

One great way to scaffold kids’ understanding of the past is to start with something that they will assume they know, and then describe how it was different in the time period you’re writing about.

Karl, Get Out of the Garden is a biography of Karl Linnaeus, who set up the system of animal and plant classifications that we still use today. How do you get kids to imagine a world where there simply aren’t consistent names for plants and animals? Here, it’s done by talking about a plant that every kid knows.

Doctors, gardeners, farmers—everybody!—argued about the names of plants. Dandelions might be called blowball, swine’s snout, or yellow daisy—depending on which town you lived in.

In Girl Running I knew that my soccer-playing girl readers were going to have to imagine a world very different from their own to understand the magnitude of Bobbi Gibb’s accomplishment in breaking the Boston Marathon’s gender barrier. So I start the book in a familiar environment: school.

Bobbi Gibb must wear a skirt to school because she is a girl. She is not allowed to run on the school’s track team. Because those are the rules—and rules are rules.

As young readers dive into more and more nonfiction, their understanding of the world becomes broader, richer, and more nuanced. But that growing understanding depends on the almost-invisible, but carefully-built scaffolds of knowledge constructed within the nonfiction they read.

Thanks you so much, Annette, for filling our writer's tool box with more strategies we can all use. 

Annette Bay Pimentel wrote Girl Running and  Mountain Chef: How One Man Lost His Groceries, Changed His Plans, and Helped Cook up the National Park Service, the 2017 Carter G. Woodson Award winner. Every Wednesday she writes about recently-published nonfiction picture books at http://www.annettebaypimentel.com/ You can also find her on Twitter at @AnnettePimentel She is represented by Andrea Brown Literary.

How to Feed and Care for a Book

by Sue Heavenrich 

Congratulations! You have a book! (If you are at the idea-germinating stage, then you need our guide on What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Book.) As joyous as this occasion is, books require a lot of love and guidance to reach maturity.

Whether this is your first book or your tenth, remember that each book has its own unique personality. Some books are easy-going, slapping words onto the page as fast as you can scribble. Others are shy. Rather than forcing them to come to the page, invite them out for pizza or ice cream. Ask how their day is going and practice your active listening skills. Perhaps they’re having a tough time with their narrative arc, or are stressed out by the amount of research they have to do. Your job, as a book parent, is to be a sounding board. Rather than offering solutions, spend time brainstorming with your book in a non-judgmental way. Perhaps your book will discover a new direction to explore.

Make sure your book gets lots of exercise, healthy meals, and plenty of sleep. Growing books need proper nutrition to support developing plot lines, and a minimum of 30 minutes of aerobic exercise to strengthen their fact-digging muscles. You can help by taking them with you when you head out for a walk or run. (A steady diet of coffee and m&m’s does not constitute a balanced diet.)

Include your book in family life and decisions. Working together on household chores, such as helping you cook dinner, fold laundry, or clean the litter box will give you and your book time to gossip about characters or debate issues. And when you discuss family vacations, make sure your book is involved. Other family members will need to know whether it will be going along or staying home alone. (note: books sometimes stow-away on flash drives.)

Submitting your book to agents and publishers is a lot like sending a kid to college. Make sure you check out potential agents and editors to see if they are a good fit for your book. Don’t pin your hopes on that “one editor”; submit applications queries to a few publishing houses/agents at a time. Once your book is accepted, make sure you read their financial package carefully so that both of you understand your obligations.

At this point it’s premature to worry about “empty nest syndrome”. Your book will come back to visit one or more times for what editors call “revision” and your book refers to as “self-loathing and adolescent angst”. Some books, particularly nonfiction, return home for more tutoring while others need to work on their language skills. Give your book a hug and remind it that you’re on its side. Be kind but firm when you tell it that it needs to undergo crucial changes to become the best it can be. Let your book know that it is not alone; all books go through the “edits”. Eventually it will metamorphose into its final stage, with a hard shell and words that sing.

A note on sibling rivalry: Do Not redecorate your book’s bedroom or give its favorite jeans to your shiny new Work-in-Progress until your book is well on its way to the printer.

Searching for Text Structure with Melissa Stewart

by Sue Heavenrich

Melissa Stewart has written more than 180 science books for children, and is one of those authors who supports and encourages emerging writers. I met her at a Falling Leaves nonfiction master class, and again at a 21st Century Children's Nonfiction Conference. So when her new book, Can an Aardvark Bark? came out this summer, I could not wait to read it. It's about the diversity of sounds animals make, from grunts and squeals to barks, whines, and roars. Like other books, this one has layers: a line of text that young children will have fun reading, and sidebars with more in-depth information that a reading buddy, parent, or older sibling can read. It's fun to read, and the illustrations are marvelous cut and torn paper by Steve Jenkins. (My review, and "beyond the book activities" is posted at Archimedes Notebook)

This book was born during a trip to the zoo. There was a plaque next to the tamarins that said they bark. "That night at dinner, my nephew asked if we could make a list of animals that bark," she remembers. From there the list grew into sounds different animals make. She knew there was a book there ... just didn't know what that book would look like. The journey from idea to finished book is always full of crumpled papers, edits, revisions, more revisions, and sometimes a total make-over. Contrary to popular belief, picture books take a long time to write. Years. In Aardvark's case, four. Years. Not counting research.

Over those years, Melissa tried different ways to structure the text of her book. First she tried "compare and contrast", but after a short time she decided that didn't capture what she wanted to say. She tried a couple of "description" styles, and a "question & answer" format. She went back and forth, tried combinations, and at times put the project on a shelf. 

"It's important to spend time away from a project between draft and revision," she said. It might not be a long time - you could finish a draft before lunch and come back after recess (or running to town to do errands), but the important thing is to get that chance to look at your manuscript with "fresh eyes and a fresh mind".

Melissa generously shares her accumulated wisdom, trials, and drafts of her manuscript in a wonderful timeline. One of the things she was looking for, as she experimented with styles, was a hook. "Animal sounds are cool," she said. But she needed a way to get the kids engaged. "I wasn't sure what that hook would be, but I knew it had to be special." At the New York SCBWI conference an editor was talking about sharks, and the phrase, "can a shark bark?" popped into Melissa's mind. Then, half a year later at another SCBWI conference an editor mentioned an orange aardvark.

"By now I'm obsessed," said Melissa. "Can an aardvark bark? No! But could I come up with an order of animals and sounds that would allow some sort of backwards connecting thing?" In search of a solution, Melissa wrote animals and the sounds they made on post it notes - and then stuck them on a wall. Now she could move them around looking for a structure that connected them - she had 300 animals and 50 sounds!

"Writing a nonfiction concept book is not easy," Melissa said. "And writing a picture book is not simple!" That's why she created timelines for this book and an earlier one, to show the careful thought, planning, and years of writing/ stepping back / rewriting that go into a picture book. 

Melissa's next book, Pipsqueaks, Slowpokes, and Stinkers: Celebrating the Animal Underdogs, is coming out next fall (Peachtree, 2018). You can find out more about Melissa at her website and on her wonderful blog, Celebrate Science.