The Moral Premise

The Moral Premise is the name given to a story writing concept and story structure aid used by professional writers to write stories. It is also used by story analysts to deconstruct stories and understand why they connect or do not connect to audiences. It applies to all storytelling genres, such as movies, novels, plays, and non-fiction. It is an ancient concept that goes back to the Greeks but was first explained in depth by Lajos Egri in his 1946 book The Art of Dramatic Writing. Egri simply called the concept the story's "premise" and describes its use in both ancient and modern plays. In 2006 Dr. Stan Williams, in his book The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success, traces the structural concept's history, describes it's use in motion pictures, and provides writers with a method for writing stories using it. Both authors were story consultants, taught creative writing, and wrote plays or screenplays. The moral premise simply describes the conflict of values around which the story evolves and the physical consequences that result. The values are described as being on a continuum of vices and virtues.
Importance of the Moral Premise
Egri and Williams claim that the premise or moral premise describes the natural (law) relationship between a character's decisions, subsequent actions and the resulting physical consequences. All stories, at their heart, are about vices in conflict with virtues, and the physical consequences that result. Typically a successful story is about only one pair of polar opposite values. Where the connection between the psychological decision and the physical consequence is perceived by the audience as true or natural, the writer is able to connect to the audience, and as Williams shows in his research, the movie will tend to be popular. But where the causal relationship between decision and consequence is perceived by the audience as false or not-likely, the story will be unpopular. Egri and Williams point out that this connection made or not made by the audience applies to the psychological or moral dimension of the story (and what the characters struggle with psychologically) and not the physical or explicit action of the story. Both authors write of how the story's physical action must always come naturally and consistently from the internal or psychological motivation of values.
Form of the Moral Premise
The Moral Premise Statement in its most basic form, as defined by Williams, is laid out like this:

leads to ; but
leads to .
Examples of the Moral Premise
Egri's premise for Macbeth is: Ruthless ambition destroys itself. But to Williams, Egri describes only half of what the story is really about, and would add to that first half a second half about the vitreous side of the story. Putting the two ideas into the above form gives us:

'Ruthless ambition leads to self destruction; but
Benevolent justice leads to rightful honor.'
In the movie The Incredibles the moral premise might be stated as:
Battling adversity alone leads to weakness and defeat; but
'Battling adversity as a family leads to strength and victory.
In the movie Die Hard the moral premise might be stated as:
Covetous hatred leads to death and destruction; but
Sacrificial love leads to life and celebration.

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