Be an Author: Attachment

Do not become attached to your ideas.

Let’s put that in a positive statement. Become attached to your successes. Though. Really. Be suspicious of all attachments in your writing. For beginning and intermediate writers, this almost always means your plot ideas.

There are no new ideas. There, I said it. Not yours, not mine, not anybody’s.

Depending on who you want to quote, there are only one, two, four, or seven different plots^* from which all stories spring. Cold comfort, I know. But the point I am making is about attachment. When you become attached to an idea, you will spend too much time working it. This is probably due to the generally accepted fact that authors are ego-driven, generally introverted, and somewhat neurotic. An idea, when staring at a blank piece of paper (or screen), may seem like the only possession in our pathetic little life and we’ll kill to keep hold of it.

What that type of thinking will do is kill your writing career.

What you want to be doing is writing four to seven times a week. On what, it doesn’t matter. My white board displays the following phrase: “Speed in Writing Equals Money.” Two-and-a-half published novels on average per year in SF will net you a full-time living as an author, in my estimation, anyway. Thus, dispense with anything that prevents you from writing, writing, writing.

If you are obsessing about an idea. If you are researching it. Outlining it. Dreaming about it. And you are not writing it, shelf it. Don’t become attached. Certainly write it down. Maybe you’ll come back to it. Or not. But thinking that you’ll never have another idea is dead wrong.

You will.

Writing ideas don’t have to be a great ideas. Just something to write about. Writing from a mediocre idea may turn it into a great idea, or the characters will take off, of the world you build will wow you, but you won’t know if you don’t give it a chance. The SF Great, Ray Bradbury wrote a short story every day for years before he published even one. Did he become attached to an idea? No.

Here’s an exercise. Look at your bookshelf, or think about movies and TV shows you’ve watched that have made an impression on you. What impressed you? What was the idea of the story? What did it make you think about? Write about that. Or, harking back to my Be an Author blog on The Message, look at the news or your daily life. What made you feel helpless, outraged, fuzzy all over, or astounded you? Write about that. It needn’t be good.

Write. That’s what it’s all about. Don’t be attached to your ideas. Or your characters. Or the worlds you’ve created. Or even your style of writing. Be flexible.

Successes, well that’s another matter. Most authors can turn a success into a sequel or a trilogy. Some into a series of books, or a series on TV. (George R.R. Martin comes to mind. We, wish, don’t we?) Even then, you probably know of an author who played out an idea until it jumped the shark, never to be heard of again.

Beware of attachment.

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* A random Google search turned up this link on the count of original plots (story ideas).

Be an Author—Article Index

Comments

[DoContra]

Writing from a mediocre idea may turn it into a great idea, or the characters will take off, of the world you build will wow you, but you won’t know if you don’t give it a chance.

As an addendum to this, execution can be its (the reader's/consumer's) own reward; especially for overly cliché ideas (and nearly always with an author that is fully aware of how mediocre/cliche their idea is).

[sevenofeleven]

Ideas are the first step on a long journey.
Execution is where the rubber or titanium hits or floats above the road.

Thus, dispense with anything that prevents you from writing, writing, writing.

Got it, kill my darlings.