The subject of “high concept” came up this week on TWLAuthorTalks, where agent Kristin Nelson is a guest (and is going to be critiquing pitches this afternoon!)

If you’re a novelist — for that matter, if you’re involved in any aspect of the entertainment biz — you’ve probably at least stumbled across the term. And hopefully after you stumbled you did more than glance at it and kick it out of the way, since it’s one of the cornerstones you’re going to need if you want your career to get anywhere.

The members of TWLAuthorTalks’ spinoff forum, PitchClinic, have been refining our pitches this week, with an eye to showing off our novels’ high concept aspects.

We also talked a bit about what high concept is. Diana Peterfreund posted this link, to an article she wrote about high concept for her lit agency blog. Here’s an excerpt:

A high concept story has the following qualities: easily understood from a few words, and promising tremendous public appeal. When you describe a high-concept story, you can see the whole story — its premise, promise and execution — in a few words. A high concept story also “has legs” — in other words, it doesn’t need a name to sell it. It doesn’t need to be written by Stephen King or have Reese Witherspoon attached to star (though neither of those hurt, and you’ll notice that these two most often produce incredibly high-concept products).

It isn’t easy condensing your 70-100,000 word masterpiece down into one catchy sentence, but as we’ve also noted on the forum, the benefits far outweight the pain. It forces you to really focus on what your novel is “about.” If you can’t find that sentence — if it’s just not there — it may mean that you have to re-think your book. It’s that important. (More to come on that topic . . .)

*Bonus points to anyone who gets this reference hee hee hee