How Great Writers Utilize the “Promise” Moment
Your guide to getting your readers to care about your story
This line in the latest Indiana Jones movie made me realize a trend in all of my favorite stories that I’d never noticed before:
“My adventures are over.”
“Perhaps not.”
It’s what some people would call “the promise” moment.
At first, I was bewildered because this is an element that you can’t find on the Hero’s Journey wheel or any list of key plot points. It’s somewhat similar to the “refusal of the call” moment in the Hero’s Journey but it still isn’t exactly the same thing.
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline
It’s a storytelling device encapsulated in stubborn dialogue from one of the main characters of the story.
These are the types of moments where there’s almost a break in the fourth wall — the writer/storyteller is promising that the story is going to be flipped on its head by the last page or the final scene.
My mind immediately goes to Mia’s line at the beginning of Princess Diaries that Anne Hathaway delivers to a confused and offended Julie Andrews:
“I don’t want to be a princess.”
But you know by the end of the film, she’ll be one — and she’ll want it. In the same that Indi will go on another adventure by the end of the story, one greater than all of the rest of them.
“Why me?” “Because you saw me when I was invisible…” - Michael and Mia, The Princess Diaries
These promises function as lead-ins to chance encounters with fates that the main characters couldn’t possibly have dreamed of for themselves.
It’s that beautiful moment in the story where we know something the characters don’t — their life is about to be turned upside down.
And for whatever reason, we eat it up.
We love watching characters be gung ho about something that simply won’t work out for them because they’re going to grow in the process. I think about the line that Marilla Cuthbert utters in Anne of Green Gables — where she says:
“Well, we’re not getting a girl.”
Little does she know about the redhead sitting on the luggage at a nearby train station waiting to kickstart their new life together.
What I love most about the promise moment that you need to know as a storyteller, is that it doesn’t really matter where it goes in the story. Ideally, it should go in the “ordinary world” beginning of your story.
“What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word, and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.” — George Bailey
The promise moment should point to the unchanged life your protagonist is living, and preferably to their contentment with their current life. It can also point to a comical future for the characters where they end up where they very much don’t want to be.
Recently I watched the movie Couples Retreat for the first time with my younger brothers. Towards the beginning of the film, they’re introduced to the idea of the retreat and told about “couples skill building” (AKA therapy) which three out of the four couples very much do not want to attend.
They’re promised by the friend leading the charge to the retreat that they won’t have to participate if they don’t want to.
Instantly, at that moment, we knew that every one of them would be sitting down for couples therapy by the end of the film.
The promise that the characters make that they won’t be doing a certain thing is simultaneously by the writer to bring us to a situation where those characters experience that very thing — and hopefully come out as better people in the process.
I don’t know what it is, but we love watching a main character get thrust out of their comfort zone after so indignantly saying that nothing would change.
These are the “what could go wrong?” moments where we as the audience are chuckling to ourselves thinking, “Oh just wait.”
To be fair, there are ultimately two different kinds of promise moments, that, from my understanding, can be equally effective.
The two kinds of promise moments:
The first kind of the opposed moment. The character swears up and down that something isn’t happening or that they won’t be doing something, to then spend an entire two-hour film or 300-page book doing that same thing.
There’s also another kind — the story where the character promises to do something to then be led on an adventure of doing that thing in a radically different way than they ever expected.
What’s beautiful about these occurrences in stories is that we’re so used to them but don’t notice their power.
We sit there and eat up the fact that while we haven’t read or watched the story before, we know exactly what’s going to happen to them in an all too familiar predictability that we’re perfectly content with.
In summary, the three elements of a great “promise” moment are:
1- Some line of dialogue that indicates the main character’s belief about their situation and the future
2- Strategic placement that hints at the irony of the character saying this
3- Delivery on that promise by the end of the story
Best of luck in writing your promise moments and telling better stories!
