Ditch the high concept

I'm working my way through the essays in a book titled Light the Dark, and I've just come to an essay by Andre Dubus III that really resonates with me.  In it the author talks about a quote from Richard Bausch.  "Do not think, dream" it's titled.  Andre Dubus talks about "trying  to say something" in his early writing. "I learned that, for me at least, it's a dead road.  It's writing from the outside in," he says.

That really resonated with me.  To me, writing to a 'high concept' is writing from the outside in.  It's letting a clever idea control the story.  I've read a couple of feted SF books recently where the concept ruled the characters.  Both left me totally cold, not caring what happened next to them.

"I began to learn characters will come alive if you back the f***k off," Andre Dubus says.  "If you allow them to do what they're going to do, and think and feel what they're going to feel, things start to happen on their own."  

I had a startling experience of that when I was rewriting Combined Cognition.  I have a character called Mai who is an engineer and friend of my main character Jian.  Mai hijacked my pen as I wrote.  All I knew about her when I started the rewrite was that she was orphaned young, and had lived on Darius Shipyard since her early teens.  But as I wrote I discovered she was in a lesbian relationship with another engineer, and Mai wanted to show me them together.  This was the strongest example of the character speaking for themselves I've ever encountered.  I took dictation from Mai.  As a result, her chapters are some of the most vibrant in the book.

When I'm writing I don't even think about 'high concept'.  I let the characters speak.  The only time I have to tangle with high concept is for submission elevator pitches. Then Imposter Syndrome comes in big time.

"There's nothing high concept about this," it snaps.  "It's derivative."  The Inposter's whispering led me to finish but never submit a novel I love, titled Starfire.

I'm wiser now.  I'll continue to let my characters lead the story to "do, not think" as Andre Dubus says. And then the high concept will have to fit what I've written - or not.