We’ve all had that experience of stepping into an elevator, realizing you’re in there with an editor or an agent, and he or she asks you what you’re working on. As you stammer out your long-winded answer (starting off with the classic “Well, it’s complicated”), the moment ends (i.e., the elevator door opens) and said editor or agent goes their way. Could you have made use of that opportunity by blurting out the hot premise version of your story? Of course! This is for everyone who’s had a hard time boiling their stories down into the simplest terms, a necessity in today’s short-attention-span era.
So, can you describe your story in, say, 30 words or less?
What’s a hot premise, anyway?
You know the term “high concept.” It’s a premise (a hot one!) that can impart as much as a paragraph or even a book could, but just hitting the highlights that turn people’s heads. According to Wikipedia, “High-concept narratives are typically characterized by an overarching ‘what if?’ scenario that acts as a catalyst for the following events.”
“What-if” is the very essence of fiction, but in the case of the hot premise, it’s everything. In just a few words, it has to intrigue and inspire, and no matter how old the idea, it has to be made fresh. The idea could be old, but it has to be translated for the modern age and sensibilities.
The best way to do this is to know your plot and story well and give it a twist that rejuvenates it. The ability to pitch the hot premise helps give those who give the go-ahead (whether they’re referred to as “producers” or “acquisition editors”) the ability to visualize the work’s possibilities and, most importantly, the marketing, because the marketing of the work is crucial.
Too often, if the opportunities for marketing the proposed work aren’t clear or don’t present themselves easily, more likely than not it gets passed on. Which is why you may be asked what you have in mind for marketing your work when you’re talking to possible agents to represent your work or even when you’re discussing your project with editors. The phrase “the look, the hook, and the book” stems from all this.
Can you think of something you could suggest for marketing your current work in progress? Something short and pithy. In one breath.
What’s hot, what’s not (a hot premise)
Some of the best books and movies cannot be boiled down into a high-concept/hot-premise logline. That’s because those books and movies are more than just the concept. Those are the books and movies that gain traction with word of mouth, quite often by the author or reader or movie attendee (for example: “I just loved it! I’m going right back to see it again!”). When my husband and I saw the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, half an hour in, he turned to me and told me that he already wanted to see it again. GotG hit his sweet spot: comics (we’re old comics fans), old rock ’n’ roll, and science fiction. Bingo!
Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy are both good examples of unlikely hits, both with seemingly limited potential. When Star Wars was pitched, it wouldn’t have been greeted with cries of joy; it wasn’t a particularly good time for science fiction—the original Star Trek series had been off the air for a few years (and the next generation of fans had barely begun to discover them in syndication), the latest version of Superman with Christopher Reeve was still in the future by a couple of years, and Logan’s Run, the last new SF movie, was a few years in the past. It was a dark time for science fiction big-screen entertainment.
“Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” Okay, that’s classic now, but when George Lucas was pitching the project, there would have been a lot of blank stares, probably the same blank stare that Gene Roddenberry got when he was pitching Star Trek. During a period in which anything science fiction was a nonstarter, the only way Star Wars would have been greenlit was by Lucas talking about his idea, explaining his love of the old Saturday morning movie serials. And then reminding his audience about a low-budget but profitable movie he produced titled American Graffiti. It never hurts to have made money for the moneymakers already.
It was in the same way that Gene Roddenberry, when he was pitching Star Trek, had a military background on which to base his pitch. He was already a seasoned veteran in the entertainment industry. When the CBS network was offered the property, they turned it down, saying they had one of their own they liked just fine (Lost in Space). In both cases, the creators came from the perspective of experience. Lucas, as I mentioned, had a well-received and profitable movie in his portfolio already, and Roddenberry had been in the TV industry for a number of years by that point.
Guardians of the Galaxy is an interesting example for a maybe-not-hot premise, because it was a property that nobody outside of Disney’s Marvel Entertainment unit would have thought could ever work as a movie. The characters on which the movie was based, the original comic books on which it was based, weren’t designed for a broad audience; it was only after the general public was acclimated to a series of solidly entertaining movies with Marvel characters that they could have introduced stories about a surly talking raccoon and his pal, a philosophical ambulatory tree.
Superheroes had to be mainstream before Rocket Raccoon and Groot could become household names. However, my husband has suggested that there is a simple line, maybe a hot premise pitch, that might have worked for GotG: “A boy and his talking raccoon save the galaxy.”
Another example of a maybe-not hot premise (but a huge hit) is Pulp Fiction, the logline of which is “The lives of two mob hitmen, a boxer, a gangster and his wife, and a pair of diner bandits intertwine in four tales of violence and redemption.”
The what-ifs for these weren’t immediately rife with possibility. In each case, the property had to have backing, momentum, and even background before they got greenlit. The best way to elicit interest is to have all the building blocks for your hot premise developed and ready to go.
Loglines and taglines
Along with the hot premise is the difference between a logline and a tagline. A logline gives you the bare premise of the story; a tagline gives you framework—the genre(s). Here are a few examples of loglines and taglines, and suggestions for why they work:
Alien
The logline: The crew of a commercial spacecraft encounters a deadly lifeform after investigating an unknown transmission.
The tagline: In space, no one can hear you scream. (“Space” gives us science fiction; “no one can hear you scream” gives us horror.)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Logline: The centuries-old vampire Count Dracula comes to England to seduce his barrister’s fiancée and inflict havoc in the foreign land.
Tagline: Love never dies. (Romance and fantasy. And horror, with the death reference.)
Jurassic Park
Logline: A paleontologist touring an almost complete theme park on an island in Central America is tasked with protecting a couple of kids after a power failure causes the park’s cloned dinosaurs to run loose.
Tagline: An adventure 65 million years in the making.
Star Wars
Logline: A farm boy joins forces with a Jedi knight, a cocky pilot, a Wookiee, and two droids to save the galaxy from the Empire’s world-destroying battle station while also attempting to rescue a princess from the mysterious Darth Vader.
Tagline: Long, long ago in a galaxy far far away… (Various genre references—“knight” and “princess,” and even “Wookiee” evoke fantasy; “droids,” “battle station,” and “galaxy” evoke science fiction.)
The Princess Bride
Logline: A bedridden boy’s grandfather reads him the story of a farm boy-turned-pirate who encounters obstacles, enemies, and allies in his quest to be reunited with his true love.
Tagline: She gets kidnapped. He gets killed. But it all ends up okay. (The first two sentences give us a clue—a grim thriller–fantasy? But the third sentence dispels that initial impression and flips the story.)
Think of your current work in progress. Is it high premise? Could it be? Or will you have to do some finagling to make it that way?
________________________
Elizabeth MS Flynn is a professional editor and has been for almost 50 years, working in topics as diverse as academia, technology, finance, genre fiction, and comic books.