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Are you happy with your concept? Then grow a premise out of it. Premises involve a task to be accomplished and a character that must accomplish it in the midst of conflict.

The following notes, gathered years ago from many books on writing, focus on developing the stakes associated with your premise. The dictionary defines “stakes” as “a sum of money or something else of value gambled on the outcome of a risky game or venture.” It also defines “stakes” as “a territorial division of a Latter-day Saints (Mormon) Church under the jurisdiction of a president.” In summary: someone in your story should stand to win and/or lose big during the course of the tale.

• What is at stake for the hero relative to attaining or not attaining the goal, which can be stated as survival, the attainment of something, the avoidance of something, the discovery of something, and so on?
• The reader should know, early on, what the consequences of success or failure will be. If you’re still only vaguely defining the stakes of your story as “happiness” or “peace,” congratulations, you’ve just found the probable weakness in your story.
• Could your story be about the hero trying to change something?
• Could it be about him or her trying to improve anything at all?
• Could it be about him or her seeking to save someone?
• How do the weight of the stakes motivate the reader to root for your hero with empathy?
• How do they manipulate the reader into emotional engagement, one that would cause us to take action too?
• How would the stakes touch us emotionally and intellectually?
• How could the stakes be vividly and viscerally established?
• How much can change if the protagonist succeeds or fails? Try to make it bigger, playing for something bigger than the main character. The bigger the win, and the deeper the cut of a loss, the better, because dramatic tension is fueled by stakes.
• What would the stakes be for the opposition should they fail?