Premise and Synopses

The Premise and Synopses section is where you pin down the heart of your novel.

It contains the following panels:

Premise
Short Synopsis
Extended Synopsis

Premise

The premise panel is where you write the premise of your novel – a single line summary of the core concept.

There are many ways to write a premise, but we have offered guidance by using the SCOOD method. This method encourages you to consider the following five elements:

Character
Situation
Objective
Opponent
Disaster

By ensuring you have thought of these five key story elements, you can help be sure you have a solid story idea, rather than simply a nugget which won’t stand up to first contact with a first draft.

To write your premise, first go to the Premise and Synopses section (second option on the navigation).

Hover your mouse over the Premise panel and click on the ‘edit’ button which appears.

This will bring up an editable panel, where you can enter your ideas for the five key story elements, and weave them together into a single summary sentence.

Note – if you don’t want to use the SCOOD method, you can simply write your preferred form of premise in the Summary field.

When you click ‘save and close’ your premise will be shown in the Premise panel.

Short Synopsis

The short synopsis is a very simple text field, where you can enter a single page summary of your story.

You can edit and save the Short Synopsis in the same way as all the other panels: hover over the panel, then click the edit button. Complete the field, then click save. See the Premise section above for more details.

The short synopsis panel has the Turn Back Time (or version history) feature. This means that if you decide you’d like to refer or revert to an earlier version of your short synopsis, you can access that.

Click here to read more about Turn Back Time.

Extended Synopsis

Like the short synopsis, the extended synopsis panel contains an simple, single text field, for entering your longer synopsis – which is an outline of your whole story, in as much or as little detail suits you.