I’ve written eleven novels since I started seriously writing fiction at the age of 12. The tenth, Seed of the Black Oak, is coming out next year from Alex Parker Publishing. It’s the first one that’ll have been published for adults (2017’s My Last Sunset is more YA).

Now, let’s not dwell too much on why out of eleven novels, only two have ever been published. (I actually had a contract to get one of the other ones published, but the publisher died before it was released. Alas.) A lot of it comes down to my biggest weakness as a writer–editing. I’m much more drawn to starting the next book than I am to really getting into the hard work of 2nd and 3rd drafts.

That’s actually highly relevant to how Seed came about.

In this series I’ll be writing extensively about the process of writing novels, through the lens of my adult fiction debut. Seed of the Black Oak is a fantasy novel that I like describing as modern sword-and-sorcery, but I do write and read other genres, so I’ll try to keep things more broadly applicable.

Today I want to talk about concepts. Where do they come from, what do we do with them, and how should we think about them?

Note that I’m talking about concepts as distinct from ideas. Everyone who likes genre fiction has an idea for a story; an idea is something as simple as “fantasy story about heroes defeating a dark lord.” A concept is more refined; it says a little more about what kind of fantasy, the setting, the heroes, the dark lord, how they go about defeating the dark lord, or some combination of these.

The concept is halfway between the foundational idea and the blurb on the back cover.

High Concept

Let’s get this out of the way first so I don’t mislead anybody–Seed of the Black Oak is not what the publishing world would call a “high-concept” novel. But its genesis–the initial idea that led to another idea that led to another idea that led to another idea, and so on, all the way until it germinated into the book that you can buy and read in 2026–was an attempt to create one.

People love high-concept stories. Publishers love them for reasons that will become apparent in a moment, and readers love them even if they don’t know what the term means.

So what does it mean?

Basically, a high-concept story is a story whose concept is immediately engaging, understandable, unique, and what I like to think of as elemental. This can be kind of ephemeral and subjective, but what I mean by that is, it’s a concept you hear and immediately think, “Damn, I should have thought of that.” It’s something that seems obvious and fresh at the same time.

That’s all kind of abstract and seemingly-contradictory, so let’s look at some examples.

“Museum exhibits come to life at night.” (Night at the Museum, obviously.) Whatever you think of the actual movie, the concept hits you immediately with countless possibilities, right? Museums can contain almost anything–mummies, animals, historical figures, sculptures, works of art, weapons, vehicles, the list goes on and on. And now you’re imagining all of these things coming to life and interacting in strange and wonderful ways.

When I say elemental, I mean that it feels like the kind of story that’s always existed, given specificity or freshness (in this case, the museum.)

Another way of thinking about high-concept stories is in terms of mashups, either of genres or character archetypes. Think “X meets Y” stories–Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein; Scooby Doo Meets Batman; Archie Meets The Punisher. Or “X in Space!” stories, which seem trite and cliched, but only because they were so popular in the heydey of pulp fiction.

My first published book, My Last Sunset, rides on this kind of high-concept mashup. It’s “Philip Marlowe in high school,” a mix of hardboiled detective fiction and teen drama. (By the way, I can’t take credit for this at all; Rian Johnson did this with his debut movie Brick, which enthralled me as a teenager. I just wanted to move the concept from screen to page.)

Here’s the thing–all of my book ideas either start with a very specific character, or an attempt to create a very marketable, high-concept situation.

I don’t always succeed at that; it’s harder than it sounds. Sure, anyone can come up with a hackneyed “Jurassic Park IN SPACE!” -type idea, but just because you ape the format doesn’t mean your concept is actually immediately recognizable, understandable, elemental. (Jurassic Park in Space, for example, is a dud because the space aspect doesn’t actually add anything to dinosaurs other than a random zero-G gimmick or sci-fi coat of paint. It might work if the animals were aliens, but then it’s just an alien movie with a Crichton coat of paint. See how these concepts don’t inherently add anything to each other?)

If a story starts with a character, it has to be a very specific, compelling type of character. A sci-fi novel I wrote was based on the idea of a Mad Max-esque post-apocalyptic raider who also happened to be a teenage girl–Savannah Nix if she was the protagonist instead of a supporting character (my character’s name was actually Helen, after the actress from Beyond Thunderdome). The idea of the character intrigued me–how did she end up in that position? What would she be like? What kind of arc could she have?

So in that case, the character idea interested me and then I put her in situations.

But for most story ideas, I look for a concept–a hook, something that grabs me, something that makes me go, “This idea is too good to not write.”

Medium Concept

I actually have no idea if this is already a term, but it’s how I think about some of my concepts that aspire to be high, but don’t quite reach that level. In practice, this tends to happen when a concept starts off high, but then kind of fades or degrades as the story actually gets written.

My last finished manuscript started off very high-concept: a paranormal romance where the MMC (male main-character) is a demon possessing the FMC. The Exorcist meets Sookie Stackhouse.

Bam! High concept.

In practice, though, I didn’t want to write a full-blown romance novel. I love reading them, but I don’t so much like having to adhere to all of the tropes and formulae that make a romance novel a romance novel. Plus, I needed any romance between two such characters to be a much slower burn, considering the inherent power dynamics and parallels to abuse that demonic possession entails.

So it became a regular contemporary/paranormal fantasy book, with hints of a romance arc. Not really so high-concept anymore; it’s just a story about a woman possessed by a demon and them becoming friends. I think of it as “medium concept.”

And that’s kind of where Seed of the Black Oak lives. Its original idea was meant to be high-concept: a “rescue-the-princess” story where the hero is another princess. The idea hit me pretty hard; a nice little twist on a classic action/fantasy trope.

With that idea in mind, I set out to write my first full-length adult fantasy novel…

…Broken Destiny.

Yeah, this journey isn’t a straight line.

First Failed Attempt

So, Broken Destiny was my first attempt at writing this story. It also was my first true Second World, high fantasy novel for adults.

It succeeds handily at maintaining the concept that intrigued me about it–it’s a save-the-princess story where the heroine is another princess (although she doesn’t know it at the beginning of the story). The relationship between the two princesses is platonic and sisterly (the main character has a male love interest).

But the story “grew in the telling,” to quote Tolkien. It’s currently 240,000 words…in its second draft.

So, obviously, unpublishable to someone like me. Way too long. And not really possible to cut down to publishable length while still retaining the stuff I like about the story. I’d have to split it into a duology or trilogy, which is far more work than I can afford to spend on a project with such uncertain prospects.

So into the trunk it went.

Making Lemonade

Here was the thing, though. Do you have any idea how much worldbuilding goes into writing a 240k-word fantasy novel?

And yes, too much worldbuilding was part of why that manuscript ended up being so long. (Only part, though; the story was intended to be epic in scope.) But it’s necessary when you’re creating a fantasy world that you want to feel real, lived-in, believable. Maybe the novel Broken Destiny doesn’t need the scene where the characters talk about shoring up the canal that irrigates their village’s crops, but I sure as hell needed to write it so I could make the world I was creating feel concrete.

So now I had a few things, aside from my unwieldy manuscript. I had a concept that I still liked. I had a bunch of maps of the fantasy world I’d created, including a couple of tantalizingly far-off regions that hadn’t appeared in the first story but which had made my imagination go wild with possibilities. And I had a document containing tens of thousands of words of deleted scenes and notes about gods, temple orders, rulers, historical events, magical artifacts and concepts, and more.

I wouldn’t need to create all of that over again. I could just focus on writing the story.

That’s how Seed of the Black Oak really began to take shape. I wanted a do-over of the idea that had first drawn me to write a fantasy novel, using all the lessons I’d learned from the first one.

The world already felt real to me. Now the story could truly come first.

Concept Decay

Again: I wouldn’t call Seed of the Black Oak “high-concept.” Certainly it’s easily-comprehensible: a warrior is in love with a princess, an evil wizard is keeping the princess prisoner, the warrior has to rescue her, bam, we’ve got a fantasy story.

You’ll notice I wrote “warrior” instead of “princess” for the main protagonist, Epi. This is the first and biggest area where my original high concept (“princess rescues another princess from evil”) began to decay.

I was thinking more about the class politics of my fiction. I’ve always been a partisan for the poor and working-classes of human history, but for a variety of reasons never made much of an effort to inject class politics into my stories, at least in any obvious way. I think my stance is clear in how I portray the rich and privileged people of the societies I write about, but class politics haven’t been much of a theme in my stories.

Broken Destiny‘s protagonist had been secret royalty as well as a Chosen One (although, with a twist hinted at by the title). I didn’t really want to rewrite those aspects of the story.

Also, though the relationship between the two princesses in that book was platonic, my partner Sara shipped them hard when I read the first draft to her. They had a lot of chemistry that became very obvious to me as I wrote it. I didn’t shift gears to make it a romance story, but I was definitely tempted.

So Seed became a sapphic romance story between the princess and a commoner. The story also became much simpler, a quest of revenge-and-rescue, with stakes somewhere below the “epic, world-ending” ones of Broken Destiny. (This also helped keep the word count in check.)

It’s still got that classic concept behind it. “Brave warrior rescues princess from evil sorcerer” is possibly the most cliched fantasy plot this side of “Farmboy has to become a hero to stop evil sorcerer from destroying the world” (we really love our evil sorcerers, don’t we?), but making it an explicitly queer romance puts enough of a twist on it that it doesn’t immediately feel like a carbon copy of a thousand other stories. The stakes can’t be the same as in every other version of that story; the relationship between the main characters can’t be the same; the resolution of their romance arc can’t be the same. You get the idea.

The result is a tighter, more focused, overall better novel with enough going for it that some very lovely people want to publish it. It may not be high-concept, but it’s a solid piece of work. NYT bestseller, take-the-world-by-storm? I can only dream. But, fun, engaging, emotional, focused enough that people will read and enjoy it for what it is? Absolutely. I have no problem saying that.

A lot more goes into a novel than where you get the idea from. In future articles in this series I’ll talk about the process of crafting the plot, worldbuilding, pacing and tone, supporting characters, querying, editing, marketing, all of it.

For now, though, if you’re a writer, I’d love to hear where you get your concepts from. What prompted your most interesting or out-there story ideas? What did you do with those ideas?