High concept

Recently I spent four days leading a workshop at the NY Write to Pitch Conference. As the members of my group pitched their ideas to editors and agents, two words bubbled up frequently. High concept. As in, what’s the high concept of your pitch? Or, this is too quiet. You need more of a high concept. So what is high concept and how do you get it?

Let’s look at Lisa Gardner’s suspense novel, The Perfect Husband, which is about as high concept as they come.

How does Lisa Gardner build high concept?

Basically, she takes an idea and then she keeps raising the stakes. So, she starts with a wife who has a controlling husband. OK. That’s bad.

He’s tried to kill her. That’s worse.

He’s killed many other women. He’s a serial killer. Oh Oh.

She turned him in to the police. He’s in jail because of her. Oh dear.

But now he’s escaped from jail AND he’s after her AND he wants her and his daughter AND he’s a police officer so she can’t go to the police because he knows how to use the police information. OMG.

So if I were to ask you what this novel’s about, you’d have no trouble telling me in one brief sentence: Woman must fight off serial killer husband. Or as the logline in the book puts it: What would you do if the man of your dreams hides the soul of a killer?

Other high concept novels: An astronaut must get off of Mars (The Martian by Andy Weir), an aristocrat lives in a hotel in Moscow for decades (A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles), dinosaurs come back to life on a theme park (Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.) It should be said that all these novels are beautifully written. It’s just that it’s easy to get across the premise quickly.

What can you do to make your novel more high concept?

1. Look for high-intensity relationships: husband, mother, lover, twin. The more universal and high value a relationship, the more likely it will resonate with readers. Readers will be pulled in more directly by two sisters in trouble than two random people.
2. Look at the verbs you’re using. Is your protagonist thinking, waiting, cogitating? Or is she running, hiding, seeking?
3. The right setting can amp things up. A poor artist falling in love with a wealthy woman is interesting. Put them on the Titanic and you have high concept.
4. . Can you combine your novel with something that is high concept: The Book Club at Jurassic Park. (No one has written that that I know of, but I feel they should. 🙂 )
5. Raise the stakes. When I was working on my new novel, MERRY, I knew the protagonist would need money to take her family to London. She owned a valuable edition of A Christmas Carol, but she treasured it and I didn’t want her to have to sell the book. She loved the book. It had been in her family for generations. But when I finally got up the courage to have her sell it, my own story became more powerful. Merry became a woman willing to sacrifice her treasure for her family. Force your character to go where they don’t want to go.

Do you think about high concept in your own writing?

SUSAN BREEN is the award-winning author of The Fiction Class and the Maggie Dove mystery series. She is the 2024 winner of the Margery Allingham Short Mystery Competition. Her new novel, MERRY, is forthcoming from Alcove Press in Fall 2025.