"Publishable" Ideas · 9:14pm Aug 31st, 2015
Time for yet another episode of "Aqua Writes A Long Comment Somewhere Else But Thinks It's Worth Reposting Because He's Kind of A Narcissist". This one was in response to a question about how to develop "publishable" story ideas. Maybe I should just make this a series or something.
The best advice I've ever seen with regard to developing ideas came from the afterword to Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, written by the author about a decade after the book's initial publication. I can't link the full text because I can't for the life of me find it anywhere online, but I did find and can quote my favorite passage from that afterword, which reads like this: "There is nothing a blue-collar nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven't already done."
Out of every great thing ever written by every great author, this quote is what I have written on a Post-It and taped to the front of the notebook I used to draft a skeleton outline for my current project on. When I first read Fight Club, it shattered me. I was (and effectively still am) a rookie at writing, feeling around in the relative darkness for good concepts and hoping my peers couldn't see my fumbling as much as I couldn't see theirs. In the midst of that struggle with skill-building and self-doubt, here was the closest thing I'd ever seen to a perfect novel. The themes bore both weight to throw around and teeth to sink in with, the prose dripped with wholly unique style, and above all the narrative was--conceptually, structurally, effectively--genius. It was the work of someone far better at writing than I may ever be, and I wasn't mature enough to handle it. To use the kind of metaphor I would've identified with at the time, I finished the book with the dread of someone digging their own grave.
And then in the afterword, the man who'd shaken and humbled me said that the best book I'd ever read started out as a short story he wrote during a lazy afternoon in an office job that he sold to an anthology for $50. Many of Tyler Durden's exploits came from stories he heard from his friends. A personal anecdote of his own spawned the idea that "you could do anything in your private life if it left you so bruised that no one would want to know the details". What I first thought was a singular work of solitary brilliance was in reality a mishmash of anecdotes, memories, stray thoughts, and disillusionment with the literary trends of the time, all wrapped around a central concept of a Fight Club with odd "rules" that gradually expanded into a larger story. Chuck's biggest contribution to the novel's birth was figuring out how to mold all those parts and pieces together and make something bigger out of them. Anybody can have a good idea or even a bunch of them all at once, but making a good story out of them takes something altogether different and rare, and it's something that enough time and repetition can teach to anyone.
The idea that some ideas are "publishable" and others aren't is a myth, as is the notion that ideas for fan fiction come about any differently than ideas for original stories. I've gone through the motions of sitting down and actively trying to make up a "great" story, and it's a good thing I was a dumb teenager when I did that, because doing that is dumb and it never, ever works. My current project is a reimagining of a rewrite of a different rewrite of what I didn't even know was a fanfic at the time, because I was ten years old and for some godforsaken reason didn't like The Incredibles very much. That's where good stories come from: the mangled remnants of failed ones before it and the little flashes of scenery that float around your brain without a narrative to leech off of, all of it space junk and star dust orbiting around the one character or the one scene or the one "What would happen if..." that kept you alert during a slow work day or awake in bed at night. And while all that percolates and grows an atmosphere and sustains sentient life and goes through some really odd fashion decisions at a few points, you practice with other ideas that aren't big enough yet or maybe don't need to be, and you learn about the industry and the way it works and the places inside it where your interests might align with others, and you form connections and contacts and a consistent pattern of drafting and redrafting, and you wait.
That's if you want to get published. If you want to be successful, God help you, because you're in the same boat I am and I don't have a fucking clue. Hopefully people still like superheroes in a few years.
Well, superheroes are pretty awesome.
I also wanted to say, thanks for showing up at Bronycon! I visited a lot of your panels, and all of them were very helpful! Again, thanks a ton!
I just want to focus on this bit for a second because I recently came to a realization that one of my fanfiction ideas would work far better as an original story.
I was sitting there in my mind trying to twist certain characters to be certain things that I don't even think an AU tag would justify in a setting that was incredibly removed from the show when it hit me that if I work on the idea more in my head, I'd have a workable idea for an original piece of fiction.
Now I just have to rework it to be it's own thing and write it.
>tfw you pile more work on yourself because it's easier.
Fight Club was very influential on me as well. I'm glad that you pointed out the larger issues that surrounded the work and how it defined your writing, and I enjoyed this article very much.
On this topic, I go to a quote from the chemist, Linus Pauling: "If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away." Of course, he was speaking about science, but the quotation applies equally well to the process of writing as well.
Well, apparently someone's tossing the idea of Incredibles 2 around, so maybe.
This is really good. For some reason it didn't penetrate the first time I read it.