No premise is foolproof, but if you’re looking for a place to start, these storylines are hard to mess up and come with an inherent structure and genre elements :

  • Rom-Com
  • Road Trip
  • Gotta Sing, Dance, Play a sport, etc. – often paired with…
  • …Rag-Tag Rebels (Scrappy Underdogs) – which is often paired with…
  • …Killing Nazis (Righteous Revenge)
  • Rags to Riches – often paired with…
  • …The Mighty Fall
  • Kid + Animal
  • Troubled Teen
  • Mad Killer
  • Cancer
  • Magical Other Restores Depleted Spirits

My Mastodon friends added:

  • She’s not paranoid
  • The ‘person who learned better’ (credited to Robert Heinlein)
  • The ‘little tailor’ (the insignificant person who saves the village or the whatever) – also from Heinlein. And supposedly, either Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy is credited with saying that there are only two stories in the world:
  • A person goes on a journey
  • A stranger comes to town

All of these have proven to be durable and effective premises for commercial fiction, but they come with baggage too. Do your research and review the classics (*and recent successes and failures*) of the genre before writing (or pitching) your own. The downside of a familiar storyline is that a lot of territory has been covered before and its easy to fall back on genre tropes and stereotypes; your challenge is to do it differently.

This is just one of the topics I’ll be covering at my workshop for the Detroit Writing Room on Writing for Film & TV on Thursday, September 28 · 7 – 9pm EDT at Bamboo Detroit.