Whether it is considering an mileu, idea, character, or event, you have to then make assumptions about what you are thinking about. IE, in an event story you have would need to assume some event occurs, and then assume what your characters response to that event would be.

Essentially everything in a fiction story is based on an assumption. All of the sub-assumptions that make up the story arc and plot come back to your over-arching view of your world/character/story. If you think about the basis for your story, does it seem at least slightly plausible? In thw world you have created for your characters, is there response and actions plausible overall?

In general I would think that any story concept can be made to work. Granted, if your story is about how a bunch of nuns decided to take up martial arts and then proceed to loot, pillage, and plunder their way along the Himilayas in the depths of winter, you might have a problem.

So I would just say that if you look at what you based your story on and it seems good to you, work with it. Maybe your reviewer just misunderstood something in the text, or had some other mental block to accepting the premise of your story. Unless everyone, their dog, and the dog's fleas say your premise is grossly miscalculated, I wouldn't worry about it.

For an extreme example, if someone gave me a story to critique, and the basic premise of the story was that Hitler didn't do a good enough job at exterminating the Jews, so the hero goes around killing them, I would consider that a huge problem -- probably unfixable without changing the story so completely that it would be almost unrecognizable.

I'm not saying this applies to your story; all I'm saying is that it is theoretically possible for such feedback about the premise to be valid.

However, I would say that unless more than one person has the same problem with the premise, then you don't really need to worry about it. Some people just don't like certain kinds of stories, i.e., "Your story is based on the completely flawed premise that a ship could travel faster than light."

For me, I don't have a serious problem with it. Every writer pulls a show-off stunt or two per story, we wouldn't be writers if we weren't prone to showing off how we can do something so clever that nobody else has thought of doing it.

But for a lot of people, once they peg a story as being a show-off stunt, that kind of destroys the value of the story in their eyes.

Accept that critique at face value...that person represents an audience that will dismiss your story as a show-off stunt because of the premise. I submitted a first chapter and had almost everyone tell me they weren't interested in reading about a war weary Civil War soldier with no superpowers, macguffins, romantic entanglements, etc. I know that I like the story, so I'll keep on writing it...I just have to accept that my current critique group isn't interested in non-super-soldiers (my other story, fortunately, is all about super-soldiers...or one particular former super-soldier, at any rate).

So maybe you just have to choose a different story for this particular group.

That being said, I'll say that sometimes, while there is nothing wrong with the premise per se, one of the major premises serves no purpose in the story (See my comments above). Card recently reviewed a book in which there is this horrible dark portal to hell room that can be used for time travel...and has no plot function. It is a novel element with no reason to be in the story at all...other than to show how imaginative the writer can be.

I say, "well, we all have to show-off a little, otherwise we wouldn't feel creative and special." Having said that, I read on.

Frankly, a much worse problem is when you have several mutually exclusive novel premises...you know, "I'm going to have P, Q, and P -> ~Q all as part of my milieu!" If somebody points something like that out, pay attention. If you have a macguffin that can destroy the bad guy in the attic of the brave and intelligent hero, and yet the bad guy is supposed to be nigh indestructable so the hero must fight his way through all kinds of quests to get to said macguffin, which is in his attic all along...well that would be P = easily obtainable macguffin can destroy bad guy, Q = bad guy cannot be destroyed without a bunch of super-heroics.

Or when you have a premise that basically undermines your entire story...the good old story of interstellar imperial intrigue with a cast of thousands, and at some point you let slip that relativity is iron clad law in your milieu. Oops!

Like everyone else, I agree that the feedback wasn't very useful if all your critic said was, "To be honest I think the biggest problem is the story’s premise."

quote:

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If you have a macguffin that can destroy the bad guy in the attic of the brave and intelligent hero, and yet the bad guy is supposed to be nigh indestructable so the hero must fight his way through all kinds of quests to get to said macguffin, which is in his attic all along...well that would be P = easily obtainable macguffin can destroy bad guy, Q = bad guy cannot be destroyed without a bunch of super-heroics.

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The Yolker is an evil villain planning to take over the world.

Our hero learns that the Eggbeater of Eternal Doom is the only weapon capable of killing the Yolker. Our hero goes through all sorts of Indiana-Jonesian heroics to try to obtain the EoED, only to find that someone had already stolen it from the Kitchen of the Gods. But from the description given by the Immortal Chef, our here realizes that it was his long-dead father who was the thief. Returning home, he goes to his attic and rummages through his father's old trunk -- and there it is: the Eggbeater of Eternal Doom.

Just like in The Wizard of Oz, the entire point of the original story is that she shouldn't have been following the yellow brick road at all, she should have used the silver slippers that were already on her feet. The Wicked Witch of the West is just scenery along the way.