What's My Line?

As I mentioned earlier in the month (or maybe all the way back in November), I enrolled in a query workshop given by Rosemary Clement Moore through Candace Havens' Write_Workshop Yahoo group. Now, I'm sure it will come as no surprise to you that one of Ms. Moore's suggestions was that we all distill our books to a single sentence, a sort of one-liner we might imagine could be used to describe our story in TV Guide. That one sentence is the "high concept" of the novel.

So, I tried to come up with a high concept. And was hopelessly unsuccessful. Oh, I wrote a few one-liners, but they all sucked like a Hoover on steroids. (That's a darned good phrase, by the way, and I'd use it in my high concept except I'm reasonably certain they had neither Hoovers nor steroids in 1839.)

But one of the problems I kept running up against was whether to write the "high concept" from the hero's perspective or the heroine's. Whose story am I telling here? It seems whichever character I choose, my one-liner must necessarily demote and devalue the other. And to me, at least, it seems I am telling (or trying to tell) both their stories, equally and even-handedly.

The germ of the idea for Living in Sin was so simple, it's hard to consider it a "high concept". I had two characters in my head: a highborn English lady disenchanted by marriage and high society who takes the unconventional step of managing her own estate and a working-class Irishman with a thirst for self-improvement and a disconcerting penchant for achieving noble ends through decidedly ignoble means (that is, con artistry, though the Victorians didn't have that phrase, which is darned inconvenient when writing a novel that involves a con game!). I knew these two people belonged together, but I didn't know how to get them into the same room, much less give them enough time with one another to fall in love.

From that germ came a plot involving a thoroughbred breeding estate brought to near ruin by a thieving steward. The hero's profession became clear: a racehorse trainer who offers his services to the heroine when he discovers his former employer purchased horses stolen from her estate and raced them under false pedigrees. Along the way, the hero concocts a "pig in a poke" scheme to fleece a neighboring landowner who also purchased stolen horses in hopes of ensnaring both the steward and his former boss in the process. And the heroine befriends the local tavern wench, whose insights into life and love offer a striking parallel to her own.

In the final analysis, though, the conflict in the story isn't the plot, but the heroine's certainty that men care more about winning the castle than the princess and the hero's fear of being nothing more than a rich woman's plaything. Pretty conventional stuff, really, except that perhaps the genders are reversed from the typical historical romance.

So, having written all that, I've distilled the most essential elements of the story and characters, but I still haven't found anything I could call a high concept one-liner.

I'm doomed! I'll never write a query letter, LOL!