megan and claire celebrate the wildest ideas
Claire: Back in the fall, you sent me a several-minutes long voice note about fanfic. Do you remember this?
Scheming and dreaming, as we do, about all the truly wild premises. We vow always to treat each other’s most bizarre stories with utter seriousness.
Megan: Ha, yes. It was about my favorite AO3 tag “crack treated seriously.” (If you’re not a fanfic reader or writer, each story is tagged with a bunch of tropes and descriptions to let people know what they’re about to get into with that fic.) I remember I had been in a reading slump, which always puts me into a writing slump. Then I fell into a huge fic reading binge and noticed this tag and my brain lit up. Crack treated seriously describes exactly how I want to approach writing and honestly what I want to read too.
Claire: When I listened to you talk about it, I thought of “craic” in the Irish sense.
Megan: Craic is actually perfect, too.
Claire: So what does crack, or craic, mean here?
Megan: In fanfic, crack describes a premise that is purely for pleasure, purely for the fun of the author. Like, it could be mashing up two fandoms that would never have a crossover (think The Avengers show up at The Pitt), or putting characters in an especially silly or wild setting. It’s by definition sort of indulgent. I think it comes from the idea that “only a person on crack could have written this."
Claire: But crack treated seriously…
Megan: Yeah, this is where you have a pleasurable, wild, even bizarre premise, but, as it says, it’s treated seriously. That means that in-world, the characters are facing real stakes, real emotional crises, they’re experiencing a full arc. I think I described it to you as the crack premise might be that two characters are on the set of Love Island, but as the story plays out, the characters face real-world consequences to how they play the game and the emotional stakes are high.
Merch from our last B*tch & Submit, a gathering of writers keen on celebrating the fun, the bizarre, the magic, the wild. The crack/craic.
The writing will also be rich and really pulling the reader along. You know how they say the best comedy is when the people involved don’t know it’s a comedy, they think it’s a tragedy? It’s similar here. The premise may be crazy, but to the characters it’s real and life altering.
Claire: You said it clarified your outlook on your writing.
Megan: Yeah, I realized that’s what I most want to write.
I want to come up with big, wild ideas that also manage to rip a reader’s heart from their chest.
I think that’s what you’re doing as well with your horror writing.
Claire: This feels like a beautiful manifesto for writing genre or anything where the concept feels like an escape but is actually a deep dive into all things real and 100% serious.
Megan: Definitely. There’s room to explore big themes in those spaces.
Claire: I was also thinking as you were talking about how this is a sharper path off “high concept.” Like, a fun hook is the very tip of the iceberg. The concept is the kernel, and the story is HUGE underneath the surface. It makes me think of an agent I once queried who said she was looking for literary work that had a commercial concept—the way she phrased it was “a word like lyrical isn’t doing the heavy lifting in the pitch.” Meaning that it could certainly be lyrical prose, but when it comes to conceiving of it, in making it into a concept, there is a punchy phrase to bottle it up.
Megan: Yes yes yes. Like, if you think to yourself what’s the crack-iest plot/premise I can think of instead of what’s a “high concept premise, blah blah blah” it’s just so much easier to generate wild, weird, creative sh*t. It’s much more permissive vs. restrictive. And then you can dig as deep as you want to within the actual story.
Claire: YES! It’s about creation, not shaping/pruning/packaging.
Megan: What I like too about this idea is that it’s not limited to just the concept/drafting phase, like you mentioned with the agent you queried. This mindset is so freeing for generating pitch language and talking about your work too. Celebrate all those things that make it weird and wild! That gets people’s attention.
Claire: I think this is what we aim to do with the Pitch Series. We want to celebrate all the things that the writer loves, because that love comes through on the page. If you love the weirdness, the reader can see that. If you take it seriously, a reader/industry professional will, too. I want us to keep this philosophy in mind for this year’s class.
Megan: Let’s treat this crack seriously.
Claire: So mote it be.
The pitch series returns, March 31
Work with your favorite Pitch Witches, Claire and Megan, at Pitch 101, Pitch 102, or both at a discount!