When You’ve Got IT

A few weeks ago, I read a proposal by my critique partner. Since I’ve been working with this writer for over four years, I’ve read a lot of her proposals, as she’s read a lot of mine. When you reach that level of familiarity with another person’s work, you develop a sort of extra-sensory perception about it. You know when a project has that certain something that is going to make it pop. She knew, for instance, that I’d sell SSG on proposal. In fact her email to me on the topic said I’d sell it on proposal, and at auction. (She’s awfully smug about being right.)

And I knew, when I read her latest, a few weeks back, that we were dealing with something very special indeed. The enthusiasm and freshness fairly shone out from the pages! I barely made notes. I said it was going to sell fast, and sell well, and I’m happy to be smug about that now:

13 November, 2007
		Children’s: Young Adult		Marley Gibson’s GHOST HUNTRESS series, featuring a transplanted Chicago teen who begins to experience a psychic awakening, then forms a ragtag ghost hunting team to research and battle the belligerent ghosts in her historic Southern town, to Julia Richardson at Houghton Mifflin, in a very nice deal, for three books, by Deidre Knight of The Knight Agency (NA).

Sadly, the rest of you all are going to have to wait until 2009 to read this fantastic new series!

I think the above description of Marley’s new series is also a top-notch example of high concept. In just this short, one-sentence description, you get a great idea of what the book is going to be about. You get a good idea of the heroine (fish out of water city girl), the setting (historic southern town), the secondary characters (other ghost hunters), and the storyline (latent psychic abilities, ghostbusting). She could have called it Medium Meets Mean Girls or Veronica Mars with Ghosts, but I think this gets the point across best. The nice thing about high concept stories is that they immediately get across that the story has “It.”

A lot of detractors of high concept say it only works with action-style stories. That “quiet,” character-driven stories can’t be expressed in a high-concept manner. I disagree with this. Last month, I saw the movie The Jane Austen Book Club (based on a book), which is a character driven piece about a group of multi-generational women (and one evolved if nerdy guy), each dealing with their own romantic issues, who decide to read all the novels of Jane Austen as a source of inspiration and comfort, and discover how Jane’s stories can create a template for their own life changes.

Less than 50 words and you’ve got a great idea of what happens in that story.

I’ve been eagerly reading the Bookends blog and the pitch reviews that Jessica Faust has been doing for the past week or so, and the more of these you read, the more you begin to see what stories have It and which don’t. (I had the same experience watching the Snarkometer entries a year back.) Now, not all of the pitches worked, even if the idea was solid, but there were instances where I could see that with a bit of cutting and trimming, that story would emerge.

And now, for the writers in the group: what do you think of High Concept? Of the sample pitches on the Bookends Blog? And how about a big woo hoo to Marley on her fabulous new series sale!