Blog | Alison Morton's Thrillers

High-concept - what's that?

Nearly five years ago, the late Paul Sussman, Egyptologist and thriller writer, told me on my Arvon Foundation course that INCEPTIO was high-concept.

I didn’t really have a clue what that meant, but I nodded and thanked him. Did it mean it was highbrow? No, despite all the Roman content, it was an adventure story, a thriller, a story of female empowerment, if you want to be grand, but not the Great British Novel.

I didn’t think much more about this until a reader described INCEPTIO as ‘Falco meets The Hunger Games’. Flattery indeed! What if those two tropes were combined? Did that mean high concept, or just a bit barmy?

Next, Sue Cook, the writer and TV personality, said my books were so visual, they were crying out to be made into films. Was this what was meant by high-concept? Coincidently, I read an article on the subject and was a little dismayed to find it meant writing in order to pitch it succinctly, i.e. a simplistic story. Now whatever my stories are, I don’t think they’re simplistic! Deflated, I decided to ignore ‘high-concept’.

However, I kept seeing the term bandied about and remembering Paul’s comment all those years ago, my curiosity rekindled. As I read on, I discovered that few agreed on a definition of high concept. Was it just a method of pitching or had it widened into a way of describing certain types of stories?

As posts and articles popped up along with ripostes and agreement, arguments and counter-arguments, I noticed that new definitions were emerging.

So I propose the following requirements for high concept:

The premise should be both original and unique
It’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. A traditional subject, but with an unexpected approach/environment/switch qualifies the material as original. However, uniqueness means being one-of-a-kind, first time, and incomparable.

Sparks a ‘what if ‘ question
What if X or Y happened? What if Z still existed? If it time had gone off on an alternative path? A succinct question for the back cover!

Highly entertaining
Gets the reader turning the pages, eager or even desperate to know what happens next. If they are interested purely on an intellectual basis, then although the idea may be interesting, engaging, and curious, it’s not entertaining.

Possesses a clear emotional focus
The emotional stakes must be high and immediate. Simply put, the story should grab the reader at a primal level and not let go: not soft and gentle feelings, but fear, joy, hate, passionate love, rage, despair, betrayal.

The story has to have mass appeal
An easy to grasp idea with a heart or essence that everybody can see, understand and engage with clearly and immediately.

Highly visual
The reader (or listener) should be able to imagine the action scenes in her head as the writer describes them. Is it filmic? And in colour? Books with cinematic imagery are almost always high-concept stories.

You can probably see where I’m going with this… 😉 Readers have been kind enough to report all these elements in the Roma Nova books. Perhaps I should now be content to call them high concept. Or should I think again?

Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers, INCEPTIO, PERFIDITAS and SUCCESSIO. The fourth book, AURELIA, is now out.

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Rome and Washington DC

As I walked past the colonnaded white buildings around the Capitol, the National Mall and the Federal Triangle, I knew I couldn’t be the first visitor to make a connection between Washington DC and ancient Rome.

Both sat/sit on a series of hills and both were/are centres of world power.

The massive scale of prestigious buildings, the columns, porticos, iconic status, eagles and strong, straight lines would be very familiar any ancient Roman.

The roof of the final version of the Jefferson Memorial (left) is based on the Pantheon in Rome (Jefferson’s favourite building, so it is said). The Lincoln Memorial (below right) although more Greek in style, to my mind, would not be amiss in the Roman world.

And of course, there is a senate here and a Capitol(ine) Hill. At the US Capitol, Italian artist Constantino Brumidi painted George Washington ascending to Heaven, surrounded by such Roman deities as Minerva, Neptune and Vulcan. In short, the connections, imagined or real, are many.

But I discovered that one part of the area where Washington came to be built was once called Rome…

In the “Original Patentees of Land at Washington,” by Bessie Wilmarth Gahn is the record:
“No. 7.Francis Pope, owner of “Rome” on the Tyber, June 5, 1663.”
In the early records of Annapolis, one finds:
ffrancis Pope, transported since 1635; wife 1649
And in the proceedings of the early Assemblies:
ffrancis Pope—member of the Assembly in September, 1642, and 1667 and 1670, he was Justice of the Peace for Charles County, Maryland.

In an old volume of records at Annapolis, Liber 6, folio 318:
“June 5th, 1663, Lyd out for Francis Pope of this Province, Gent., a parcel of land in Charles County called Rome, lying on the East side of the Anacostian River [meaning here, the main channel of the Potomac], beginning at a marked oak standing by the River side, the bounded tree of Captain Robert Troop and running north by the river for breadth the length 200 perches to a bounded oak standing at the mought of a bay or inlet called Tiber, bounding on the north by the said Lett and a line drawn east for the length of 320 perches to a bounded oak standing in the woods on the East with a line drawn south from the end of the former line until you meet with the exterior bounded tree of Robert Troop called Scotland Yard on the south with the said land, on the west with the said river (Tyber), containing and now laid out for 400 acres more or less.”

Capt. Robert Troop’s “Scotland Yard,” itself north of the tract “New Troy” which extended far north of the Capitol and Congressional Library of today, was therefore the southern boundary of Mr. Pope’s Rome.
(Sources: http://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/pope/3903/) Much more about the early history of the Capitol site from the US Capitol Historical Society http://www.capitolhillhistory.org/library/04/Jenkins%20Hill.html

For the love of Rome…

As Enlightenment gentlemen, the founding fathers of the new United States rather liked the idea of a representative democracy modelled on that of the Roman Republic, but they also conceived of a capital city that looked like Rome — or what they thought Rome looked like.

In fact, during the Republic (traditionally dated to 509 BC, and ending in 27 BC) Rome was largely brick, not a city of shiny marble, which came later, started under the stewardship of Augustus and his right-hand man, Agrippa.

Of course, the Roman Republic eventually fell and the Roman Empire eventually crumbled. And the sharp minded might note the irony that the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1776, the year of American Independence.

Union Station, DC

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New – a late addition
A bonus picture I spotted when reviewing my photos…

Arches with columns and eagles either side in perfect symmetry, single columns with eagles topping them…

Take out the electric street light and you’d be in ancient Rome.

(Or perhaps – retaining the streetlights – the in the imaginary Roma Nova itself…)

Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, INSURRECTIO and RETALIO. CARINA, a novella, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories, are now available. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. NEXUS, an Aurelia Mitela novella, is now out.

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INCEPTIO selected as Indie Book of the Day!

Delighted to discover that INCEPTIO had been nominated for the IDB award and even more so when I received an email saying it had been selected as Indie Book of the Day today, 15 June 2015!

They sent me a shiny certificate…