579 – Finding a Novel Premise

Mar 15, 2026

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Your novel (a book over 50,000 words) needs a premise that is novel (new, fresh, exciting). Also, words are hard! But how are you supposed to find a novel premise when so many other writers have already put their own ideas out there? Are you doomed to keep repeating what has come before? Fortunately, no! The answer isn’t as simple as adding a wizard, but adding a wizard probably wouldn’t hurt.

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

[opening theme]

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: It is getting harder and harder to find unique podcast topics, because we’re nearing 600 episodes and we’ve done everything. Usually we’ve done things twice, I swear.

Oren: Yeah. We have a lot of episodes that are X topic again, because it’s been six years.

Chris: What if we just do an episode about putting googly eyes on your computer mouse, and using that as a substitute for human companionship? That would be unique. That would be original. Can we just do that?

Oren: Would it be novel or would it be bizarre? Hmm

Chris: Hmm. This time we’re talking about finding a novel premise. Sometimes words intersect in weird ways, so we don’t mean novel as in a long story that’s 40,000 words or more. We mean novel as in fresh and interesting, and feeling relatively new, so that it still has entertainment value.

Oren: You do need one of those for your novel, usually though.

Chris: Yep. Yep.

Oren: Just to be clear, those two words are used a lot together and it’s horrible. We don’t like that.

Chris: It’s a lot clearer when we talk about novelty if it’s not an adjective, if it’s in a noun form, which we’ve talked about a lot before. But just in case anybody’s new and hasn’t heard us for five years or something, basically novelty entertains people, part of what we refer to as ANTS, which are four engagement factors that almost all stories try to cultivate at some level. Some will use some more than others, but whereas there can be other ways that engage audiences that are pretty unique to specific types of novels, these ones are usually found everywhere, and novelty is one of them. It just means that it’s different in a way that’s entertaining, and that’s why we like to use it. It also is really useful because it gets people excited pretty quickly before they read, which means it is particularly handy for marketing.

Oren: Often a high novelty concept is what people will use to sell the book, like vampires, but instead of drinking blood, they drink knowledge from books. Wooh. That’s cool. Right? That’s neat. Right?

Chris: That’s what they refer to as a quote unquote high concept. And so that’s very useful, and you can do it without a premise. It’s easier to make your novel novel – it’s easier to make your book novel if you start with your big picture choices. It’s easier to do anything if you start with your big picture choices and plan it from the beginning, surprise, surprise.

Oren: Whoa. So shocking.

Chris: So shocking. So you can do it a smaller scale way, but it’s a lot harder, like how witty are you? Because a lot of books that have a lot of novelty, that’s not obvious from just the premise or concept of the novel, is because they write really entertaining narration, for instance.

Oren: Or they have funny characters or unusual characters. There can be novelty bonuses from those things too.

Chris: Yeah, so it’s not that you can’t add novelty without thinking of a novel premise. It’s just certainly an easier way to see that it’s taken care of and that your story stands out a little bit and can attract readers.

Oren: I noticed something interesting as I was looking at some of the work I’ve done as an editor, which is that this is an aspect of storytelling I don’t have that much experience with, and the reason is that by the time someone gets to me with their manuscript, they’ve already picked a premise. Usually what I’m trying to do is help them fulfill that premise to the best extent that it can be. It’s very rare that I’m telling someone to completely change premises. The premise has to be, in most cases, deeply flawed for that to be a thing. And in that situation, I’m usually trying to help them create a premise that isn’t just completely broken. The one time I can remember recommending a more novel premise was with a client who had a somewhat anonymized story where it was a fantasy world, but everything was weirdly modern in a way that did not fit. It wasn’t just an urban fantasy setting. It was a second world high fantasy, but the world was strangely modern. And so I had recommended making it into more of like a crystal-punk setting since magic crystals were already a big part of the plot and clearly interested the author. So that’s the closest I can think of to helping an author find a more novel premise. Because usually they’ve already picked that by the time they hire me.

Chris: I did work with an an author who wanted to find more ways to distinguish her setting. I remember that happening. In many cases, when people come to us, of course, they already know what they want to do. And so we may be helping them iron out things in their setting that are kind of working against each other, which does help novelty, because you want a unified impression. We’ve talked about with world theming, if your world feels like a random assortment of stuff that has nothing to do with each other, that does take away from the novelty. We kind of help people straighten that out. We’ve had a few instances… also in your own stories. I know this is something that you’ve worked on.

Oren: Well, that was interesting, because in my book that’s actually published, that premise is not very novel. I was doing a lot of research on the Byzantine Empire and playing a lot of Crusader Kings. So that’s where that concept came from. And it doesn’t have a magic system, which probably is its biggest drawback to fantasy fans, but I decided that was worth it because any magic system I could have come up with would’ve just been kind of tacked on and I think would not have really been good. But I can tell people read it and they’re like, oh, it’s very tense, and I kind of like the characters, but the world’s a little uninteresting. And it’s like, yeah, I get it. I get it. It’s just a medieval-ish setting. There’s no wizards or stuff. I’ve been trying to work on that more with my short stories, I sometimes have more luck, because with a short story, you could have a much more idea focused narrative, like a familiar who has to fight the physical manifestation of her witch’s depression. That’s cool. That isn’t something you see very often. I’m sure it’s not never seen, but it’s not normal. And that would be hard to make a novel out of, but a short story – heck yeah. Get in there.

Chris: The thing about novelty is that it creates lots of excitement, but it does tend to fade somewhat quickly, and so short stories can actually rely on it a lot more. This is where we see those little meme stories that get spread around social media. Those things are always very novelty focused because it has to generate attention and excitement very quickly so that somebody actually reads it and then quickly shares it, and then if they lose interest in it after that, it doesn’t matter. Whereas in a novel, usually what happens is it draws people in, it gets them entertained while the plot is booting up, which is very valuable. But then as the novel progresses, it usually starts to take a backseat to things that take a lot higher investment.

Oren: And that’s one of the key things here, is that premises that are novel often do it by being very strange in such a way that it would be difficult to support a long story using that premise. Part of the reason is that if that premise could support a long novel, we would see more people using it.

Chris: That is definitely the biggest issue, or one of the biggest issues right now is we have a very crowded field with mass media. You see stories from so many different people in so many different places, and it becomes difficult to find something that will set your novel apart. You know, there are different levels, right? It’s not an all or nothing thing. In this case we’re talking about a story in a Byzantine setting and, you know, that one is a little niche. It’s not that there aren’t people who are fascinated by Byzantine history. Of course, we discussed that and you told me that wouldn’t work because anybody who loves Byzantine history that much will wanna see characters get blinded.

Oren: No, absolutely. This book is not for huge Byzantine history nerds. They’ll read it and be like, what is this? This is not what the Byzantines did. Yeah. It’s not. Because I didn’t wanna write that. I was inspired by Byzantine history, but I did not want to write that level of brutality, and to a certain extent impenetrability. There’s a reason why we use the word Byzantine to mean complicated and confusing. That was just not within my capacity to write. So no, it’s not really for big Byzantine history fans either, which is my own fault.

Chris: Yeah. But sometimes just having something that is interesting to some people is a benefit. And even genres that are a little bit tired right now might still have a few fans. The one that that I think everybody thinks is overplayed right now is a lot of superheroes and Marvel stuff, because so many Marvel stories have come out that people have been oversaturated. When something has been a big trend and now it’s on the receding end of the wave, that’s a really bad time, unfortunately, to have your story be about those things.

Oren: Although it’s also kind of irrelevant to authors in this particular case because superhero novels have just never really been a thing. They exist, you find occasional superhero novels, but they’re very rare and most of them aren’t very good. And very few of them attain any success, and I think there are some reasons for that.

Chris: Yeah, I think we’ve discussed that before a little bit.

Oren: And this was true before Marvel, it was true during the height of Marvel, and it’s true now. But in terms of books, those same trends happen. For a while you couldn’t go anywhere without hitting YA dystopia. Then people got tired of that. Right now it’s romantasy. People will eventually get tired of that. Things will continue.

Chris: Fairytale stories… I had a fairytale novella that hit the wrong place in the wave. And I was not thinking about trying to write to trend at all. It’s just that’s how it worked out. And it also just, you know, I don’t think it had enough of a concept that distinguished it, that set it apart. Whereas usually when you see like a fairy tale story, it’s all, oh, from this character’s perspective, or we’re gonna twist it in this way, or what if Cinderella died?

Oren: Well, it was also based on the Snow Queen, right? Which is a cool fairy tale, but not one very many people are familiar with, like how most people know about Frozen.

Chris: Probably still more popular than the Goose Girl though.

Oren: Well, I mean that’s the trick with Kingfisher’s Goose Girl retelling is that it’s not a Goose Girl retelling.

Chris: Not a Goose Girl. And the only way they can get away with saying that is because nobody has read the Goose Girl.

Oren: I have no idea why it’s marketed as a Goose Girl retelling. Is there someone in the publisher’s marketing department who’s like, yeah, Goose Girl, there’s a big market for Goose Girl retellings out there? Because I don’t think there is. Nor is that an accurate description of it. So why? Someone tell me.

Chris: But any case, generally, you know, your subgenre often determines are, is your audience interested in, and you’re trying to do for a little bit broader audience than something that’s super niche. But then you also wanna do it in your own way, right? Which is kind of where you get to the real novelty of your book. Should we talk more about what is the difference between something that’s novel and something that’s bizarre? Because the most obvious thing about novelty is that you do want it to be different. But again, when something hasn’t been covered yet, there is often a reason why it hasn’t been covered yet, and not everything that’s different will really be novel. It has to make sense to a certain degree, have a little bit of plausibility or a little bit of realism. If it feels completely off the wall, it’s more likely to be interpreted as absurdist. An example I could come up with is a world where the letter H is paramount or something, and everything is shaped like an H. It’s too off the wall. And some people like absurdist stories, but I think they’re not really novel for most people. As far as I can tell

Oren: There are always gonna be books that are kind of toeing the line, by which I mean pushing boundaries. And some people will see them as like, oh, that’s cool and neat. Other people will be like, that sounds kind of silly.

Chris: That’s too weird for me.

Oren: Right. I saw one recently that was a space opera retelling of Dracula, specifically the part of Dracula where Dracula is on a boat. And in this case it’s a spaceship, and the spaceship is alive, and there’s an evil vampire that has killed its crew and passengers, and it teams up with a bunch of other mythological creatures to go hunt Dracula. And I read that and I was like, eh, no, I don’t think so. That’s a little too weird for me. But from what I can tell, other people seem to have liked it. So that’s a question. It’s gonna depend on personal taste sometimes.

Chris: I do think that once you get into that area, it can also sometimes start to be humorous, even if that’s not what you intended. I guess don’t really like that. I could imagine reading something like that, but not taking it very seriously.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That feels like there is a lack of theming. Right. When we talked about when you have different, clashing things together, right. And it’s like, okay, maybe I could laugh at this team up, but it doesn’t feel like a world that feels real anymore.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Now, granted, I have seen some surprisingly good integration. So the book Bleeding Mars has got vampires in space. It actually does a really good job of blending those two things together. The world feels really colorful and the vampires are the upper classes, right, who have come up with like, rigorous technology to keep themselves live forever. It’s got heavy themes of classism happening in there, but it’s also very colorful and it just works, because it’s been thoroughly thought through, and those different elements that normally feel like they’re clashing have been thoroughly integrated together. And that’s great. That does get harder the more random things you put in there.

Oren: If you’re willing to put in the work, you could probably mesh vampires and aliens. I think you could probably do it and it could be interesting. But if you were then like, also, my setting needs to have unicorns. It’s like, hmm, okay, now that’s a third thing that’s not really related to either of the other two thematically, and that’s gonna make it even harder.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Or the unicorns aren’t really unicorns anymore.

Oren: Right.

Chris: Possibly things have been changed so much that they no longer resemble the original trope.

Oren: It’s always funny when someone will be like, this is my long lived, pointy-eared, beautiful humanoids, and I call them the lendarians, and it’s like, that’s an elf.

Chris: Why? Just call it an elf.

Oren: I know what an elf is. Versus, this is my made of rock, sort of shambling creature that eats dirt and has a five minute lifespan… that’s an elf. No, no it’s not. Why are you calling it that? Don’t call it an elf. Which way, modern author?

Chris: We don’t see that latter one as often, but we do see it sometimes. Another book that for me has lots of novelty, but I get the feeling for other people is a little weird, is Piranesi. Piranesi takes place in a kind of giant, world sized mansion that’s open to the sky and completely filled with statues and water.

Oren: See, we’re getting into Southern Reach territory here, because I thought it was a labyrinth. I know the main character refers to it as a house, but in my head –

Chris: He refers to different areas as different wings of the house.

Oren: He does say that, but in my head, it’s never not going to be the labyrinth. That’s what it looks like to me.

Chris: Well, what we have is presented as some kind of built structure with different hallways and rooms, and it is constantly filled everywhere with all of these statues of everything imaginable. And it is open to the sky and has water in various places, in lots of the places, and tides. I think that’s real cool and neat, but I can see how somebody else would be like, okay, but that’s a little random. And I don’t know, maybe if there were more context, if this was a place in a world and we saw, oh, this is the labyrinth that this god built, or something that gave it context, maybe it would feel a little bit less on the weird side. But I was still good with it. I liked it, thought it was cool. I can see why somebody else, because it’s just a little bit out of the blue and a little bit wait, why and how –

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: – did this happen?

Oren: Although we were hardly alone. Piranesi was quite popular and successful. I get it’s not gonna appeal to everyone.

Chris: I think it’s novel for most people, but I think it’s bizarre for a few. Basically an easier route that definitely avoids getting into bizarre territory and creates lots of novelty, but may have a limited shelf life, is putting two very different things together and contrasting them. This is the whole Pride and Prejudice and Zombies thing, and it’s just easy to take an initial concept and say, okay, what haven’t people done yet? This is very similar to when we were talking about putting new twists on classic genres. What if Little Red Riding Hood, but she’s a villain hunting the innocent wolf. Right. Which actually reminds me of a Red Riding Hood story that you had, Oren.

Oren: Yeah, that one was all right.

Chris: But no, this is, there is something interesting about this. So Oren had a story that was based on Red Riding Hood, where Red Riding Hood was a werewolf hunter. Not a big stretch if you wanna take her in a badass direction, have some action in there. But an interesting thing that we found in beta reading was that some of the readers started the story without knowing it was about Red Riding Hood, and then at some point caught on.

Oren: It was like, oh, okay, so the girl in the woods with wolves named Red? Okay, I get it now.

Chris: And it clearly added entertainment value for them. And that’s one of the ways we kind of started to think about novelty. Because then we learned, oh. We should actually put this in the title because this improves the experience. Not that it wasn’t fun to have readers catch on at some point, but you do need to market your story in some way. Usually. part of a collection, Maybe you can get away with not doing that, but usually

Oren: I probably should have just advertised it as a goose girl retelling. [Chris laughs]

Chris: But yeah, reversing the hero and the villain, telling it from the perspective of a new character, switching genres. You could do sci-fi Dracula, that would be fine. Probably less weird than the Dracula and a living ship and then all these other –

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But you could absolutely do a sci-fi Dracula if you wanted to.

Oren: Dracula is a very enduring aspect of storytelling. Dracula has stood the test of time. A lot of the classics have. It’s a lot more risky if you’re gonna be like, I want to do a romantasy version of the novel The Way of Kings. Those are two fairly recent things, we don’t know how much longer this romantasy wave is gonna last, how long are people gonna be talking about The Way of Kings? Now, of course, you’d also run into copyright issues, if you could somehow get past those.

Chris: I don’t know, people have been copying The Name of the Wind and getting away with it.

Oren: Yeah, so maybe it’s fine.

Chris: You just don’t call it The Way of Kings and then you can copy the plot and the prose style apparently, and it’s fine.

Oren: Alternatively, just do romantasy version of The Name of the Wind since we know this has been successful twice. [laughter]

Chris: It seems like a good way to go that might help Name of the Wind, because that story needs some more plot. And if you added romantic, so this is, this giving something a twist is also what Blake Snyder refers to as “same but different,” although that’s kind of in a Hollywood context where we want to follow a formula.

Oren: I mean, “same but different” is the most reasonable title that Blake Snyder has ever come up with.

Chris: It is. It’s ’cause it’s not buzzy.

Oren: It’s like, come on, Blake. That just means what it says. You can’t call it “same but different.” You gotta call it “blimp, but plane,” like what does that mean? And then open the section with a five minute anecdote about how one time you saw a blimp and thought it would be more familiar if it was a plane.

Chris: I have to say the “same but different” makes me think of, oh, we’re doing yet another crime serial. Now let’s just give the detective a new, weird profession. Uh, they’re a circus acrobat now, and they use their acrobatic silks to solve crimes somehow.

Oren: Look, I got nothing against crime serials. I have seen a number of crime serials do this in ways that I thought worked really well, and others that I did not think worked particularly well. I watched Lucifer a while back, and we both tried, and –

Chris: I mean, that show is honestly really bad, for reasons that are pretty unrelated to the fact that it’s a crime serial.

Oren: I actually think it is related.

Chris: Oh, you do?

Oren: I do, because he’s Lucifer. Why does he solve crimes? What does that have to do with being Lucifer? Nothing, whereas if it’s like, Harry Dresden, he’s a wizard who solves crimes, and it’s like, okay, he’s got magic you can use to find things. That’s a common wizard concept, but Lucifer is just too specific. And it shows in the TV show, he is like, why are you here, Lucifer? What is the purpose of your presence?

Chris: Okay, so admittedly I was thinking about the misogyny of the show.

Oren: I mean, yeah, it is also very misogynist, but when has that ever stopped a show?

Chris: Well, it’s why I stopped watching it. Some of the stuff does get that dated. I think that show was really too recent to be doing the stuff it was doing.

Oren: When I watched it, I was like, wait, this is from 2016.

Chris: What?

Oren: I know that was a whole decade ago, but really, I would’ve guessed this was an early aughts show with the way that it’s written.

Chris: Yep, not great. So yeah, that’s kind of the easiest way to do novelty. But there are other ways. Make your main character an unusual creature; if your main character is someone who’s really novel, that really helps, and spreads things over the whole book and choose, you know, an unusual environment or setting works, subversions of any kind, of course. Subversions are kind of twisting something that exists. Come up with something that you’ve seen before, and then what is your own spin and your own take on it. And then the last thing to really think about here is, of course, that you need to make use of your premise. It is definitely not a set it and forget it kind of thing. It needs to actually matter to the story. Like with Lucifer, we’re trying to make Lucifer solve crimes in a crime serial and God, one of the things I initially did not like about the show is he just did not feel like Lucifer.

Oren: Yeah. He just seems like a guy.

Chris: He’s just some guy, but you know, you need to actually have the plot related to whatever the novelty is. If it doesn’t matter, it’s just not gonna provide the same level of entertainment. It’s gotta be part of the story.

Oren: If you were gonna have Lucifer solve crimes, you would think that they would be, I don’t know, religious in some way, like him being Lucifer would matter to the kind of crimes he’s solving. And I mean, in Dresden Files, he is solving magical crimes. He’s not going around as a wizard just solving insurance scams. That’s one of the things about it that’s so strange, is it’s like, yeah, I guess Lucifer could solve this normal blackmailing case. I suppose. I don’t know, maybe he could investigate a stolen holy relic or something.

Chris: And then you need to go into some detail. The novelty really comes to life when you actually delve into detail about whatever it is that is fresh and unique. Show people how it works, how it runs. For instance, the movie Warm Bodies, which, it was part of the zombie craze, but it was very different at the time because the main character was actually a zombie and has a romance. It opens by going into his life as a zombie from his perspective, and it’s funny, demonstrates why he needs love, that kind of thing. If you have an unusual environment, give some people details about the environment. If [you have] a strange character, tell people what their life is like, and how it is slightly different because they’re a zombie or whatever they are. Just make sure that you actually bring it to life, and that’ll be easier if you like it and you’re not just playing it to be a crowd pleaser.

Oren: If you have some passion, that’ll show through, as opposed to just, [robotic voice] I have been contractually obligated to include this Pride and Prejudice sequence. [Chris laughs] I mean, that is kind of how Pride and Prejudice and Zombies felt. It doesn’t really feel like they put in very much effort to make the dialogue that they weren’t just taking directly from Pride and Prejudice sound like it came from Pride and Prejudice.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: You could tell; the dialogue would audibly change gears when they were quoting Pride and Prejudice dialogue. It just doesn’t sound the same. And I was a little disappointed by that. I was hoping that more of the characters would talk like they were from Pride and Prejudice.

Chris: You also have to decide, okay, how are you gonna manage humor? Because in many cases, when you have a really high novelty premise, especially if you’ve got two contrasting things, it does tend to slant towards humor. It doesn’t necessarily have to be humorous. One of the things that really surprised me about Pride and Prejudice Zombies is how seriously it took itself. I expected that to be a really funny slapstick movie, and it’s not. That really upped the bar for how it had to integrate the zombies and the original Pride and Prejudice characters and all of those other things, and it didn’t really meet that bar. You do have to kind of sometimes work harder if you don’t want something to come off as silly.

Oren: All right. Well with that, I think we will take the fresh twist of calling this episode to a close. We’ve never done that before actually.

Chris: Asking you to support us on Patreon is not very novel. Everyone’s doing it. [evil voice] But what if I asked you to support us with an evil voice? Wa ha ha ha ha. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. It’s all part of my evil plan.

Oren: Well, I’m sold. Before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[closing theme]

579 – Finding a Novel Premise

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