High concept characters
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Sometimes you read a book based on the premise and the character is incidental. This is when someone has an idea for a book—say, a run of the mill suburban mom’s life is turned upside down when her son goes on a school shooting spree. While some people may be turned off by that idea, others may be intrigued (I made up that idea on the spot, but this is pretty much the premise of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, and probably also a few other books). Some of these books, IMHO, have a somewhat flat main character. Sometimes this is because the writer isn’t particularly good, but other times it may be strategic—the character is there to provide a stand-in for you as the reader. You/they experience what most people would experience. If your son did a mass shooting, you would be shocked, horrified, you would wonder what you did wrong as a parent. Let me ask a question of the people who have actually read this book or even seen the movie—can you tell me something about this mother that is about HER as a person, and not what she does or what happens to her? The only think I can recall is that she kinda didn’t want to have kids, and Tilda Swinton’s performance and her having really red hair. That’s fine— not everyone is setting out to have memorable characters. The point of that particular story is more of a “what if” than a “I’m going to make you never forget this character.”
In many cases, it makes a lot a sense to have a somewhat blank main character. Harry Potter, for example. (My writing about him is not condoning anything about JKR. I’m actually kind of dunking on her). It’s a middle grade fantasy. You sort of want your readers to relate to the kid living under the stairs who isn’t particularly remarkable. It makes you feel like any day an owl could show up and invite YOU to a magic school. We are told very literally that Harry is special because he is the Chosen One… But does he actually do anything that makes him special? We are told that he is brave. He ends up making the ultimate sacrifice and there is some mumbo jumbo about how this makes him special. The problem I had with this is that I have no reason to believe that Ron, Hermione, or literally any other good-coded character wouldn’t have made the same sacrifice if called to. And yet, people love the character of Harry Potter. I think this might have less to do with the unique configuration of characteristics that make him up (um, British? Has a scar? Is sometimes self conscious?) than the affection that people grew over a series of books that were released during their childhood.
But sometimes you read a book for the character, and the premise might be irrelevant. I would divide these types of characters into two buckets: memorable characters and high concept characters (who may also be memorable). Saying that a character is memorable is typically something you say after you’ve read a book. They don’t have to be exceptional or even unique, but something about them sticks with you. People love Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache and are willing to follow him across multiple books. In fact, people might be more likely to say “There’s a new Inspector Gamache book out” than they are “there’s a new Louise Penny book out.” (I don’t think any author would take that as an insult unless they were really fucking tired of writing that character. Insert premise for Misery!) Enduring series are often built around MCs that are smart or skilled in some way, clever, and flawed, but not in an overtly offensive way. A series character is like investing in a Honda: it’s going to last a while so it needs to be broadly appealing and not particularly controversial.
I think the characters in A Step Past Darkness are memorable, but not high concept. These are supposed to be characters you feel like you might have run into in high school, which was why I specifically built them to be “regular,” relatable, and not larger-than-life. They deal with problems that are common and understandable: concerns about people making fun of them at school, will they ever live up to their parents’ expectations, is that a new zit coming in, will their best and only friend transfer to another school and leave them behind? But “common problems” doesn’t have to translate into “flat character.” If we say that James is a burnout who deals drugs and sometimes we hear him mouthing off to authority figures—okay, he’s Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club. But I’ve drawn James as a three dimensional person. Overlayed over that stuff you see that he is deeply afraid of success. He has intense feelings of abandonment because of his father leaving, then his mother dying. He has a lot of anger about the haves and have-nots. He’s intelligent, but uninterested in doing well in school (because, you know, that would come a little to close to trying and trying is a bit too earnest but also, there’s that fear of success.) If you make a three dimensional character and you do it well, they will probably be memorable even if they are not likable. Of the six main characters in ASPD, all of them are coded—despite being flawed—as likable, except for Maddy. Maddy is that mean popular girl you went to school with. She’s at the top of a social hierarchy that she ruthlessly enforces. But I also show you other sides of her: her deeply controlling family, her evangelical church which causes her to have a significant and damaging crisis of faith, her not being willing to let evil continue unabated. I didn’t do this to make people like her. I did this because I wanted to render all her dimensions, ugly or beautiful. People who are nasty are nasty for a reason. And despite her being mean, a lot of readers end up up liking her journey, if not her in particular.
But a memorable character doesn’t have to be good (morally), or likable, or someone we would want to have over for dinner. Appalachian writer David Joy’s The Line That Held Us features this very scary character who I will never forget. The story skillfully sets up Dwayne Brewer to be this guy known around town for being someone you absolutely should not mess with—everyone in town knows this. He’s terrifying, perhaps even psychotic. You know, that guy who might kill someone in a parking lot one day and literally no one in town would be surprised. Anyhow, this other guy Daryl is hunting and accidentally kills a man. That man happens to be Dwayne Brewer’s brother. The second Daryl realizes who he’s killed, both you and him are like Oh uh. Big fucking Uh-oh. As in very bad shit is about to go down, and could Daryl possibly avoid it? It’s a great setup because of how well the character of Dwayne is set up.
So what’s a high concept character then? If we review what a high concept book is, it’s a book that could be pitched in a sentence or two, and based on that pitch alone you would be interested in reading it. The Platform is a movie where every day, the residents of a mysterious prison are presented with a massive bounty of food. People on level one are presented with all the food first and can eat as much as they want before the platform of food moves down a level. A month later you are moved to another level—it could be level 50, or level 200—you have no way of knowing which one, or how much food there will be. I like this movie and its sequel a lot. There are main characters in them, but I can’t really remember anything about them
Similarly, a high concept character is one where the character itself could be pitched in a sentence or two and someone might be interested in reading a book about them, regardless of plot. When I first started writing Never Saw Me Coming, people would ask me what I was working on and I would say, “A thriller but the MC is like Amy Dunne from Gone Girl mixed with Cher from Clueless.” Some people might want to read about that character regardless of the content of the story because such a person is likely to do/ say interesting things. I know I’ve done a good job when readers ask me, “Is there going to be more Chloe/Charles books?” The hook, at this point, has shifted from being about the plot to being about the characters.
I read many (most?) of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles when I was quite young. Like many people, I really liked the character of Lestat. Was he designed to be high concept? I’m not sure I can answer that question for you. He’s a character who embraces the darkness of being a vampire (at times he is flagrantly murderous), while bucking the traditions of that community (why should vampires be organized in a structure exactly like this with these rules?)—even at his own peril. He’s sort of carelessly lusty, selfish, temperamental, but also charming and funny. He provokes interesting moral questions and questions things that are accepted without question. He stood out as particularly interesting in contrast to his foil—Louis, who spends all of Interview with the Vampire pouting and not having much to offer. The “I’m a vampire and I feel bad about my desire to kill people” angle isn’t interesting to most people. I’m probably not the only one who likes The Vampire Lestat, the second Vampire Chronicles book more than Interview. This book solely focuses on Lestat, who appears across all the other Chronicles books. The quality of Anne Rice’s writing went down, and I stopped reading her books (hey, I’m not the only one who’s said this.) At some point maybe around 2014 I heard that she was going to write another Lestat-focused book and I got it once I came out. So somewhere over time, I think Lestat became high concept. There was some secret sauce to his character who could bring back readers who had left the series based solely on the force of his personality. (the book was, unfortunately, quite bad. Anne Rice got to the point of success where her editors stopped editing her. The thing about editing is that you need someone to challenge you and if you are already famous you don’t “need” someone to challenge you in order to sell books.)
So how do you make a high concept character? At the ground level, they need to be three dimensional, but that isn’t enough. I would say that as a writer, I tend toward making high concept premises with high concept characters. Not all of the characters are high concept. Chloe and Charles in NSMC have a deliberately larger-than-life quality, while Andre is more normal. More like you and me. You are supposed to feel the peculiarity he feels when being around them. I could have had Charles had a more normal background (he is the son of a fracking billionaire who is the head of the Republican National Committee in Virginia). I chose not to. None of the MCs in ASPD are high concept, but you could argue the villain—the charismatic leader of a megachurch that runs a small town, and also he’s supposed to be dead, but isn’t for some reason—is. My third book (currently on submission) has a mixture of high concept and normal characters. How do I know who is and who isn’t? Well… Cyrus is a guy in a band with his friend who is more talented than him. I love Cyrus. And as written he is three dimensional. But that pitch alone probably doesn’t make someone put the book immediately in their TBR pile. But the central character of the book, Owen, when I was first writing this book and people asked me what I was writing about, I would say (excitedly), “You know that CG profile about Robert Pattinson during COVID where he comes off as extremely weird? Okay, that, except he’s this brilliant musician in a heavy metal band who gets accused of murdering his entire family.” (the people most familiar with the profile were the most excited about the book). To me, the pitch for the book includes both a high concept character and a high concept premise. There is a certain larger-than-life-ness to high concept characters. You don’t forget them because they’re so unique.
So… how do you make a high concept character?
This is a really good question I wish I had a more straightforward answer to. As someone who likes writing high concept books/stories, I would just say that I’ve always been an “idea man.” (well, woman.) Some people are idea men. I know people who are brilliant who are like, “I’m not good at coming up with ideas, but I’m good an executing them.” Someone invented Superman—an Idea Man. Then they were off and running doing all kinds of stories about Superman saving people and being a good dude. But somewhere along the way, another Idea Man came along and said, “So we’ve invited this all-powerful being who helps humanity... but what would happen if he turned bad?”
I guess I would say this: anything high concept has to be unique. If I ask you who your MC is and you say “she’s a suburban mom struggling to hold down a job while raising kids and she thinks her husband may be cheating on her” that might be totally fine, but it isn’t unique. Fiction based on real life celebrities is inherently involving a high concept character. Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham is an alternate history about Hillary Clinton if she had never married Bill. This is combining a high concept character with a high concept premise. Lee Kravetz’s The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. is a fictionalized story involving Sylvia Plath. Plath-heads are going to be interested in the book regardless of its content. When we say “Sylvia Plath” we instantly have a light that goes off in our head: we know who that is. We already have a schema for her in our minds. Another way of having a light go off in someone’s head is if we present the reader with something so novel, that they say, “huh. I would like to read a story about someone like that.” to me, at least, this calls for a character that is unique, somehow over the top, somehow extra extra.
Exercise
Come up with a character who is a suburban mom. In two or three sentences, who is she?
Take that same character and consider, what would make her memorable?
Take #2 and consider, what would make her high concept? What could be high concept about a suburban mom?
vPhoto by Samuel Castro on Unsplash