A Kossack's Guide to Book Publishing - part 12 [updated]
Thu Sep 21, 2006 at 10:39:55 PM PDT
Ideas
If you're a writer, people approach you reasonably often with variations on the following proposition: "I have a great idea for a book. How about I give you the idea, you write the book, and we'll split the profits." They seem to think that the key to a great book is a great idea, and that the specialness of the idea is what gives the book it's value. I hate to disillusion them, especially since most of them don't believe me, but here's a cold truth about writing: Ideas are the easy part.
As science fiction writer Alfred Bester once explained it, the average writer could never again have an idea for the rest of her life, and she'd still never run out of things to write about - just going through the backlog of ideas she'd been meaning to write about would fill a lifetime worth of books. Why do new writers see ideas as such a priceless commodity, then? Mostly because they've been conditioned to. Let's start with some
Snopes-style debunking:
Ideas are rare and precious gems. Writers have been freely trading ideas around and riffing on each others' concepts since the days when best-sellers were sung, rather than read. (It's been pointed out that the Aeneid is basically Homer fanfiction.) A huge amount of writing is reactive - a writer sees the way a book treats an idea, and takes it in a completely different direction. They're both working from the same idea, technically, but the books are completely different, and may not even be in the same genre. In science and history, this is the tradition that each idea is built on a foundation of the ideas that preceded it, and there's a similar dynamic in much of fiction writing. Your ideas won't descend from the heavens on a fiery chariot and astonish all who see them; they'll grow out of many things you've read and seen. What makes you a good writer is your ability to synthesize your experiences in ways that make them feel distinctive and fresh, not your ability to summon flaming chariots.
People will steal my ideas. If they're good ideas, people probably will. And it won't make a bit of difference on your career, except possibly to help it. If you're working in movies or cancer research, or any other field where a fashionable idea is a hot commodity with a brief shelf-life, then this is a valid concern. In books, which take an average of five years or so between the time the idea hits you and the time the book hits the shelves, it's a lot less of a concern. Writers who try to chase hot ideas typically aren't successful - by the time they finish writing the book, the field has moved on - and what publishers are buying depends a lot more on your writing ability and vision than on the underlying idea. It's not like if you don't hurry, no editor is ever going to buy another vampire book; or retelling of the King Arthur story; or romance in which a woman runs away from the Big Sky country to the city as soon as she can and finds riches and fame, only to be drawn back as an adult by a parent's death and forced to choose between the life she's built and the world she left behind that she's now old enough to appreciate (as typified by the studly but wounded rancher who worked her now-dead family's land).
Nobody has ever thought of this before. Maybe, maybe not. But who cares? Whether it's new is a lot less important than whether you can turn it into a book people want to read. Accessible often trumps original.
This idea will revolutionize the genre I'm writing in or This idea is too hot for publishers to touch. Often what this means is, most publisers' sales forces have no idea what to do with this. Books that are way outside the box often flounder, because even if a publisher buys them, it's difficult to figure out what the audience for those books is. The genre doesn't get revolutionized by the idea; it gets revolutionized by the idea connecting with a heretofore-unknown audience. For instance, when Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien responded to his publisher's request for a sequel to his moderately successful children's book by handing in, eleven years later, a 1,000-page fantasy novel (a more-or-less extinct genre at the time), the publisher was able to split the book into a three volume hardcover, get it serialized on the BBC, and turn it into a moderate literary success - but it never occurred to that publisher that Americans would have any interest in such a highbrow British literary work, or that there would be any demand for it in paperback. It was only when Ace Books' Don Wollheim published a pirated paperback edition (capitalizing on the British publisher accidentally screwing up the American copyright) that Lord of the Rings became a publishing phenomenon and essentially created the modern fantasy genre as a publishing category.
Developing Ideas
There's a cynical argument to be made that the only things people write about in the English language are sex and death. (This isn't true of other languages, but you can boil down most of what's written in English to one or both of these.) But obviously, over the last few centuries, we've learned to develop our approach to sex and death with a certain degree of sophistication and complexity.
In general, one idea isn't enough to carry a book. You may see an idea and know that you will eventually use it somewhere, but until it combines with several other ideas in your mind like the Administration's fantasies about how liquid explosives work, no chemical reaction takes place, as it were. It's not unusual for an idea to lie fallow for years, until something else connects with it and allows you to take it further. (For this reason, lots of writers write those ideas down in a notebook or PDA so they're not faced with moments of "this would have fit perfectly with that thing I can't quite remember from a few years ago.")
While ideas come from things you experience or read about and people who you know, the finished product doesn't always bear much resemblance to the original, nor should it. The book I just finished, a thriller set in the 1880s, has a plot that pivots on a scandal based on a true story that I came across while doing production work on a historical monograph on the Venetian court system during the Renaissance. Part of the protagonist's backstory was inspired by a particularly surreal breakup that happened to me a couple of years ago, although as the story went on, what was intended to be backstory became an important element in adding tension to the main plot. (I doubt the woman in question will recognize the events in the story... although I included her in the acknowledgments while keeping the reasons why elliptical.) While researching a palace in Germany where I wanted to set a swordfight on a spiral staircase (as important to 1890s thrillers as car chases are to 1980s police films), I discovered that there were no spiral staircases in that particular palace - but there was a room filled floor-to-ceiling with priceless Far Eastern porcelain. A swordfight in a room full of porcelain is a pretty irresistible thing to a writer - but a whole lot of other ideas had to happen first before it had any relevance to the story. Many other ideas went into the story, none of which by themselves is new or striking - but I certainly hope that the story as a whole, and the particular way these ideas combine, and some of the emotional issues I explore in the book, feel fresh and new.
I'm not trying to be discouraging here - just the opposite in fact. (There are plenty of places in this series where I try to be discouraging, and I'm usually pretty upfront about it.) The point I'm making is that writers have good ideas because they work hard at them, and learn to develop them from a variety of sources, and hone their ability to work with ideas over a period of years. Great ideas are not a matter of divine inspiration, they're a product of a lot of hard work, a fair amount of creativity, and the ability to put things together in an unusual but interesting way. In other words, this is something you can do. It may take a lot of practice, it likely will not come easily at first, but too many writers think that they can't write a book because it requires some touched-by-the-gods idea that no mortal could conceive alone. You may have to do a lot of revising and working through bad ideas before you get the knack, but the way to come up with good ideas is to actively work at writing, to allow your ideas to grow and become more complex as you outline, and to actually crank out the two pages a day or so it takes to write a book, rather than waiting for the gods to bring you the idea that will finally push you to write that book you know you have in you.
There are many reasons why writing that book may take you a while. Maybe you need to work things out in your mind a bit longer, or live a bit longer, or experience something new before you'll be ready. Those are all good reasons. But waiting for the one single, shining idea that will transform your life is like waiting for Joe Lieberman to transform into a Democrat. As soon as you stop waiting for it, you notice all of the little fragments of good ideas that you already have, and start paying attention to how they can combine into the tapestry of ideas that come together to form a good book.
The Rest of the "How Publishing Works" Series
I do still monitor and respond in the previous episodes, so feel free to post questions or comments in them if you'd like. Unless someone has a more interesting suggestion or I end up chasing something shiny, I'm going to try to start talking about publishing contracts (probably split into a few episodes) next Thursday night.
Part 1 - Why bad things happen to good books.
Part 2 - Avoiding publishing scams.
Part 3 - Literary conventions (with an emphasis on SF Conventions).
Part 4 - Book packagers.
Part 5 - Submitting a manuscript.
Part 6 - Publishing lists.
Part 7 - Literary agents.
Part 8 - Copyediting.
Part 9 - Marketing and publicity.
Part 10 - Outlining.
Part 11 - Editing.
Part 12 - Ideas.
Part 13 - Contracts.
Part 14 - How Writers Get Paid.
Crossposted to Progressive Historians.
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