Randy Ingermanson's Take on the Moral Premise: Part Three

Hasn't this series been helpful? Randy's explanation helped solidify some things for me where the topic of including the moral premise in my writing was concerned. And now I can be more intentional about it. How about you? Read on for the final installment. ~ Annette

Creating: The Moral Premise--Part Three

by Randy Ingermanson

Let's be clear on one thing. We don't actually live in a fair universe. In the world we live in, murderers, rapists, and con men all too often go free. Decent people all too often get whacked.

The Moral Premise of a story is not about what is. It's about what "ought" to be. Your reader knows perfectly well what "ought" to be, and so do you.

If your fiction violates what both you and your reader know "ought" to be, then your Moral Premise is bogus and you're going to make your reader intensely unhappy.

The surprising thing I learned from talking to Stan is that in a well-crafted story, the Moral Premise applies to EVERY character. One way or another, the good guy, the bad guy, the love interest, the sidekick, the class joker—everybody—is playing out the same Moral Premise.

This really puzzled me. Could it possibly be true? I decided to analyze my award-winning novel OXYGEN, (which I just republished as an e-book last month).

My co-author and I never really much thought about the Moral Premise for OXYGEN. We just wrote a story we liked. Was it possible that, even without thinking about it, we had crafted a Moral Premise into our story that applied to all our characters at once?

The answer turned out to be yes.

The Moral Premise of OXYGEN is very simple: “Honesty leads to mutual trust, but dishonesty leads to mutual distrust and suspicion.”

I quickly verified that every single major character in OXYGEN is wrestling with exactly this Moral Premise. We didn't design this into the story. It just happened. We built it in by intuition. But as I recall, it took about fifteen drafts to get the story right.

And that's why it's important to study this stuff.

Stan makes a great point in his book: If you ask yourself what the Moral Premise of your story is as you develop it, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort, and you won't have to depend on your intuition, which is often unreliable.

There is much more to say about a Moral Premise and how it works. Stan talks about something he calls the "moment of grace" which makes a lot of sense to me. I'm not going to discuss that here.

If you want to know the mechanics of the "moment of grace" and how to integrate it into your story structure, then get Stan's book. He worked hard on it, and he deserves to get paid for his ideas.

I highly recommend THE MORAL PREMISE, by Stan Williams. It's a brilliant idea. I'm going to use Stan's methods in the future on every novel I write, because I think it'll save me a lot of time.

And it'll probably save me someday from writing a story that just won't fly with my readers. Great power, great responsibility, and all that.

~~~~~
This E-zine is copyright Randall Ingermanson, 2011.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 28,000 readers, every month. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel.

Randy Ingermanson's Take on the Moral Premise: Part Two

This Mixing-it-Up Monday, Randy Ingermanson is back for his second installment of this great series on the moral premise. Read on! ~ Annette

Creating: The Moral Premise--Part Two

by Randy Ingermanson

Please understand that Stan (the author of The Moral Premise) doesn't recommend that your book should be only about nice people. Plenty of great fiction is about people who aren't nice.

THE GODFATHER is a great novel about a mafia family that isn't a bit nice. THE DAY OF THE JACKAL is a great novel about a psychopathic assassin. GONE WITH THE WIND is a great novel about some loveable rogues whom you'd kick to the curb if you met them in real life.

The key thing to understand when talking about a Moral Premise is that the story needs to end "right" even if the beginning and middle are "all wrong."

In the second DIE HARD movie, we see an airliner full of people get blown up right near the end. And the audience cheers. Why?

Because the airliner is full of bad guys who are escaping the long arm of the law. They've spent the whole movie doing Bad Stuff, but in the end, they get

the only possible justice.

No, that doesn't always happen in real life. In real life, sometimes the bad guys get away. In real life, sometimes the good guys get reamed.

People don't read fiction to get another dose of real life. They already know real life sucks, mostly.

People read fiction to see things work out the way they "ought" to work out.

In fiction, the bad guys should get whacked in the end. The good guy should get justice. Or the promotion. Or the girl. Or whatever else he was trying to get.

In fiction, characters should get what they deserve, in a way the reader doesn't expect.

Let's remember that you don't have to write your fiction in black and white. In fact, you generally shouldn't. You've got a lot of shades of gray to work

with and you're allowed to use them all.

Very often, the protagonist is both good and bad and has to make a decision about which way to go. Every reader knows that the "right" decision "needs" to be rewarded and the "wrong" decision "needs" to be punished.

You can write this as a simple design pattern: [Virtue] leads to [Good Result], but [Vice] leads to [Bad Result].

Here, you need to fill in [Virtue] with any particular virtue you want—honesty, sincerity, justice, love, humility, whatever. Then you need to fill in [Vice] with some particular vice opposed to your chosen virtue. Likewise, you need to fill in [Good Result] and [Bad Result] with the good or bad things that "ought" to be the results in a fair universe.

~~~~~

This E-zine is copyright Randall Ingermanson, 2011.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 28,000 readers, every month. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel.

Randy Ingermanson's Take on the Moral Premise: Part One

Last September, all the buzz at the American Christian Fiction Writer's conference was on two things: e-books and the moral premise. Here, Snowflake guru and writing mentor, Randy Ingermanson, shares his take on the concept in a very helpful way. Here is part one of a three-part series this month. Enjoy! ~ Annette

 Creating: The Moral Premise -- Part One

by Randy Ingermanson

Here are the kinds of novels I hate to read:

* Novels that aim to make me change my politics

* Novels that aim to make me change my religion

* Novels that aim to make me change my scientific views

* Novels that aim to make me change my mind on ANYTHING

I read fiction to have fun, not to read a diatribe, a sermon, or a polemic.

How about you? Yes or no on preachy fiction?

That's what I thought. It's unanimous.

This is why I was extremely leery when I learned a few months ago that one of the main speakers at a forthcoming conference was going to speak on "The Moral Premise." The last thing I wanted to hear was that we novelists need to be writing moralizing books.

As it turned out, my fears were groundless.

The speaker at the conference was Stan Williams, Ph.D.,the author of the book THE MORAL PREMISE, and a fascinating guy. (He has a degree in physics, which is always a good sign.)

Stan's basic idea is that a movie (or any kind of fiction) will fail when it is based on a "moral premise" that the audience believes is false.

Audiences will suspend disbelief on lots of things, but they bring in certain bedrock assumptions about the way the universe ought to operate. So do you.

You exert ultimate power over the universe which is your Storyworld. You know the drill. Great power, great responsibility. Don't screw up.

I spent some time talking with Stan at the conference and was extremely impressed with his ideas. I highly recommend his book for anyone who wants to put a strong theme into their fiction but doesn't want to come across as didactic or moralizing.

When you write a story with a sound Moral Premise, you are not trying to persuade your audience of something they don't believe. You are writing a story that confirms something they (and you) already believe.

Big difference.

~~~~

This article is copyright Randall Ingermanson, 2011.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 28,000 readers, every month. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel.