Coming Up with a High-Concept Premise

Do you need one? (no) Would it help you? (yes)

This is a post I guest-wrote for Sanjida Kay’s substack in November 2025. Here’s a slightly expanded version, for anyone who hasn’t come across it yet!

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If you’ve read through enough agent wishlists, you’ve probably encountered the term “high-concept premise.” It’s one of those nice packaged phrases that means something very specific, and yet proves almost impossible to define.

You’ll know one when you hear it. If you have to ask, you haven’t got it. Everybody wants it, and no one’s going to tell you how to get it. In fact, they’re probably worried that you’ll take theirs.

In this post, I’m going to attempt a working definition of the “high-concept premise,” and I’ll discuss why they’re always in demand, and what to do if you don’t have one.

High-Concept = Self-Explanatory

If you tell someone the premise of your story, and their response is, “Sold. I’m in. No further questions. Where can I get a copy?”—then you’ve got a high-concept premise.

A high-concept premise is, in simplest terms, an inherently exciting story idea.

If your novel is about a multi-generational family coming to terms with the death of their beloved dog, you don’t have a high-concept premise. Your novel may very well be gripping and eventful on the page, but the premise alone is not inherently exciting. You’ll need to do all the hard work in the execution to get readers on board with this complicated family and their complicated feelings about Buddy.

With a high-concept premise, the execution matters much less. Of course, it’s possible to bungle even the best ideas, so you still need to deliver on the premise with reasonable competence. But when the idea is good enough, the execution isn’t a crucial selling point. Who cares whether the book is insightful or well-rendered or pitch-perfect? The book is guaranteed to be exciting, and that’s enough.

There’s something self-explanatory about a high-concept premise. Check out these examples of high-concept novels below, and see if you have any follow-up questions:

The remains of the human race are packed into a rocketship, hurtling away from the destroyed Earth. But the ship has a crack in the hull. (Marissa Levien’s When the World Gives Way.)

A woman falls asleep next to her fiancé and wakes up five years later, in bed with a different man. When she returns to the present, she has to decide what to do, now that she knows what the future holds. (Rebecca Serle’s In Five Years.)

A con artist on the run discovers that she’s won the lottery—but she can’t cash the winning ticket without giving herself in to the police. She needs the help of someone she can trust, which means making amends with her long-neglected family. (Marissa Stapley’s Lucky.)

The pitch kind of covers it, right? What backstory do you need to know about that rocketship? You’re already leaning forward, wanting to find out what happens next.

With a “quieter” premise, on the other hand, you’ll find that the follow-up questions multiply. I encountered this when pitching my first novel, which follows an ensemble cast of characters in a small town. Do they all… know each other? Is there some big event at the end that brings them together? Are they competing for something? What happens to them?

A “quiet” premise isn’t the kiss of death. But it’s harder to pitch than a high-concept premise, and the bar is a lot higher. A quiet literary novel has to be phenomenal on every page to get published. A high-concept novel can afford to be a little messy.

It Practically Pitches Itself

Agents and editors often say they want books with a strong hook that are “easy to pitch.”

Before I worked in the publishing industry, back when I was writing convoluted novels that were definitely not easy to pitch, I found this irritating. Knowing how to pitch books is the whole job of agents and editors. The desire for easy pitches seemed like a kind of laziness. How about I just write my masterpiece, and then you figure out how to sell it?

But after working in publishing for a few years, I understood. When you sign on a book as an agent, or when you accept it for publication as an editor, you then have to pitch that book dozens of times to dozens of people, many of whom have just listened to dozens of other pitches.

Imagine going to a party where every single one of the guests has heard that you’re a novelist. “What is your book about?” asks each of the fifty guests in turn. By the end of the evening, your pitch will be a lot shorter and more brusque than it was at the start.

If you’ve got a high-concept premise, you’ll be in fine spirits. “It’s about the last living humans all packed together in a rocketship, escaping the earth,” you’ll say casually, and wander off to the cheese platter.

But if you’ve got a quiet premise, you’re in for a grim evening. “It’s about relationships,” you’ll find yourself saying helplessly. “Between people. And dogs.”

This is the predicament that your agent and publisher will be in: endlessly pitching your book to people who can only give a minute or two of attention. When a book comes across their desk with a premise so clear, so self-explanatory, that it practically pitches itself, they flash ahead to all those meetings with relief. “Everyone will get excited about this one,” they think.

It’s not that they’re too lazy to put in the work pitching a more complicated premise. It’s that they do put in that work, all the time, for books they really love, and the results are often depressing and underwhelming. So how great for them if they discover a novel that will automatically, by premise alone, get everyone else just as excited as they are?

Stretch the Stakes

If a high-concept premise is a story idea whose appeal is universal, automatic, and self-explanatory, how do you come up with one?

Well, if there were a magic formula, all books would be high-concept.

Let’s put it this way: no one will ever want your novel to be less high-concept. Having a high-concept premise is always a good thing. That doesn’t mean all high-concept premises are good—just that, given the choice between a family drama with complex characters, and a family drama with complex characters who are competing for the inheritance of their father’s multibillion-dollar media corporation (Succession), everyone will pick the latter.

So where does one look for a high-concept premise?

A lot of writers head straight to the retelling. It’s King Lear, set in the underwater city Atlantis. It’s The Great Gatsby, set in a network of post-apocalyptic New Zealand bunkers. It’s the myth of Orpheus, set in a desert wellness cult.

In other words, you borrow someone else’s premise, and then you smash it into a new setting. Voilà: high-concept.

I am decidedly not a fan of this approach. I have yet to meet a retelling that I liked. But you can see why people reach for retellings when trying to come up with a high-concept premise: half the pitch is self-explanatory. You already know what you’re in for.

The way to come up with an original high-concept premise is to create a high-stakes dilemma. If you have a novel concept percolating, see if you can stretch it out to the maximum conceivable stakes.

To take a really simple example: let’s say you’re developing a story about a character with amnesia. The character has forgotten everything, which would be a big deal for anyone. But how can you make it the biggest deal ever? Amnesia has to be especially bad for this specific person. Maybe the person is a trained assassin, and he’s being pursued by hit men, and he doesn’t even know why. (The Bourne Identity.) Maybe the person is covered in tattoos that give cryptic clues to coming terrorist attacks. (Blindspot.) Maybe the person is haunted by dreams of Mars, even though apparently he’s never been there. (Total Recall.)

You get the idea. Whatever your concept is, stretch it to both ends. What are the worst possible circumstances for X to occur? Who is the worst possible person to be saddled with the task of X? What is the worst possible thing that could happen once X is in motion? How could the timing for X be uniquely, catastrophically ill?

So if you have a multi-generational family getting all bereaved over the death of their beloved dog—you know what to do. One of them killed the dog. Another one covered it up. One of them loved the dog more than their own children. One of them hid a dark secret in the GPS chip implanted in the dog’s skull. And so on and so forth.

Do I Have To?

If you’re a literary fiction writer, you probably read the last paragraph totally aghast. Is this what it takes to get published?

Absolutely not. Also, that high-concept version of the dog book sounded dreadful.

There’s nothing mandatory about a high-concept premise. It just makes certain stages of the publishing process easier. It does not, however, guarantee a good book. And if you’re having to contort your novel in bizarre and unpleasant ways just to make it high-concept—don’t do it!

My first novel has a fairly quiet premise. I knew that as I was writing it. I was a little annoyed with myself for not coming up with a high-concept premise, because I knew that having one would make my life easier. But—this was the novel I had in me, and I wrote it the way it needed to be written. And it ended up selling.

Don’t sacrifice the integrity of your story just to shoehorn in a high-concept premise. It’s not worth it, and it probably won’t work anyway. Focus on telling your story the way it needs to be told. If you’re like me, you’ll put years of work into a quiet literary novel… and then the morning after it’s done, a brilliant high-concept premise will suddenly occur to you out of the blue. Oh well. Write them both!

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Last week, Kate Broad posted some great advice on how to write a one-sentence pitch, and also workshopped draft one-sentence pitches from the comments. I love this idea. So, if you’re working on something with a “quiet” concept, give a quick pitch of the concept in the comments, and I’ll brainstorm a few ways to make it high-concept.

Thanks for reading!