Wednesday Writing Tip: Don’t Break Your Promises

I recently watched one of my favorite novelists give lectures on YouTube. As he discussed the rules he follows for writing plot, I had many ahah! moments. Here’s the first lesson that made me question all of my decisions: When you write a story, give your reader a promise and then don’t fail to fulfill the promise. 

I started writing for catharsis, so I initially didn’t bother to figure out why my plot does or doesn’t work. I just wanted all of my little philosophical ideas in the story. When I turned my story into a novel, I struggled to keep it cohesive. This rule of promises fulfilled is helping me sweep through and do some clean up. 

Let me explain further. A promise is the thing that pulls us into the plot. In a romance novel, the heroine meets a hunky dude at the beginning of the story. We are expecting that this hunky dude is sweeping the heroine off her feet—after shenanigans, of course. The author sets the story up to make us want this outcome. But let’s say you get twenty chapters into the book, the hunk dies and the heroine marries the pirate king who has oozing sores on his face. Our author just broke her promise, and we just chucked her book across the room. 

But what if the author had set a dystopian tone and the heroine is actually a plague victim who loves the hunk from afar. He was her childhood sweetheart, but now she must watch him with a telescope from a tower in plague-land as he flirts with many young maidens. Then the pirate king, who is also a plague victim, falls in love with her. He recognizes the purity of her heart even though she’s deluded about Mr. Hunkster, and now the book is about how he wins the love of a crazy plague victim. See how the promise just changed? The tone is considerably darker, but I’m not bothered by it. I wasn’t promised light and fluffy. 

My favorite part of the lecture was how he said a competent writer can take almost any plot and bring it to life, so don’t worry about tipping your hand just because you keep your promise. Even tired old tropes can live again, and that’s why we have more romance novels than people to read them.