Ideas, I’ve Had A Few
This is the first of another series (Hey, what’s the big idea!) which, if it generates enough interest will be turned into an ebook when it’s done (the other series is being fixed up expanded and edited for ebookdom.)
Doing this finds a solution between my not wanting to stop blogging and feeling guilty because I’m writing stuff that can’t be sold. I do take suggestions for other series on aspects of writing (or reading) in comments or email.
To start with let’s establish that though ideas are not the main material writers work with ( Not unless you write non-fiction or the type of hard sf or puzzle-based mystery that might as well be non-fiction. There is a market for that, of course, but it is not the largest market, nor the one most writers work. People who want to use their brain in a pleasurable way now have a lot more outlets, like puzzle games.) they are essential to a writers’ work. (The essential material of the writers’ art is emotion. More on that later.)
My mom used to make clothes and it’s easiest for me to explain the place of ideas in terms of dress making. An idea is the first glimmer of a project. “I know,” you say. “I shall make a hat for my cat.” (Most ideas are, I shall add, about that sensible. The first thing to do when you get that first glimmer of a thought is to sit down till the urge passes. If the urge doesn’t pass, then you might have something worth working with.)
But though we call this “an idea” it’s not. Not in the sense of having something you can make a story from. Not yet. (Though most newbies try, which is why most newbies write “stories” under two thousand words.)
So, let’s start at the beginning.
Let’s define story idea first.
1- A concept is not an idea
When people tell you things like “I have an idea for a story,” or “there are no new ideas for stories” they are not actually talking about a story idea. They are talking about a concept. Concepts are the very first glimmer of an idea and they’re usually fairly general. (No, boy meets girl isn’t even a concept. It’s a pattern. We’ll talk about those later.) To give some examples a school for magic users is a concept. A rogue who has never fallen in love is a concept. A body in a very respectable house where no one knows the victim is a concept.
In our example, a hat for the cat is a concept. Or a shirt is a concept. A dress is a concept.
A lot of writers say “you can’t steal an idea, because there are no new ideas.” Most of the time – 99% of the time – they’re not talking about ideas but about concepts. Unfortunately their words give cover to not-particularly-clueless newbies who then proceed to come within a whisker’s edge of plagiarism.
It’s like clothing. There are no new “ideas” in clothing, either. Heck, “skirts for me” well… talk to Scottish men. “Hats for cats” talk to your local masochist society.
BUT saying “There are no new ideas in clothing” won’t get you out of trouble if you copy a designer’s dress and sell it as the real thing. So, keep that in mind.
2 – An idea is not a pattern.
What do I mean by pattern? Well, my mom made her own patterns. I suspect, mutatis mutandi, I tend to also. But that doesn’t mean you don’t start with a pattern off the shelf. You want to make a dress, so you find a pattern for the sort of dress you want – say, a tailored dress. And then you bring it out, you cut it, and you start thinking about how to change it. Some changes are inevitable, like making it the right size, but then, you know, say you want it to look like you have a bigger bosom or a smaller waist. There are ways to do that. And you go to work. The pattern is the general shape of your concept, and it also, usually, is not startlingly original.
In the same way, say you have a concept for a romance “They are in this place and can’t get out, and this guy who never fell in love starts feeling for this girl.” You then look for a pattern and find that boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again will apply to your story. That is a pattern. Then you squint and start making changes so it will fit your situation.
Attempts to mess with the pattern to make them “totally new and startling” are usually unsatisfactory. For instance, I can’t imagine anything more annoying than finding a dress where the bottom is sewn almost shut, so that you can barely shove your legs through and when you have, you can’t move. There are few things you can do to alter the PATTERN of a dress and still have it functional. Romances where in the end the boy and girl (which in this case means people of any age, of course) don’t end up together aren’t clever. They’re annoying. Or literary. Oh, wait, I already said annoying.
Also, they’re not really new. Literary is just a different pattern. It’s like making a cover for a lawn chair, then selling it as a dress. (I once wore a pillowcase as a dress, but that’s something else.)
Patterns can be applied to many concepts and settings and characters. A lot of us who write fanfic or who did something for a fanfic antho and were rejected know about “filing serial numbers” and writing the concept/pattern in a different setting with different characters, so we can sell it.
3 – Ideas are highly individual.
An idea – an actual fully realized idea, of the sort you can sit down and write a story from – are highly individual. Not all of them have been written and you bet your behind they are copy-rightable and they can be stolen.
There is nothing more annoying in a writers’ group – particularly one full of newbies – than the person who heard “there are no new ideas” and therefore proceeds to write watered down carbon copies of other people’s ideas or even of famous stories. You can’t call them to task because they start repeating “There are no new ideas” like some form of tourettes.
And this isn’t true because ideas are highly personal, highly modified combinations of concept/pattern/alterations. As such they are well-nigh unique.
Take the dress concept, and the pattern. Now add in fabric of your choice, throw in strategic slashes on the skirt, put in a belt that closes off center, just THERE. See what I mean? If you see another woman (or a woman) wearing the same exact dress, she sure as shooting stole it. Impossible for it to be otherwise. The fact that she did her own stitching (different wording) or the fabric is thinner doesn’t mean it’s not plagiarism. An executable idea is NOT free.
This is why though you can take a story and file the serial numbers and publish it, there has to be a story there. Yes, you can have a spaceship that goes out to explore different new worlds. You can even have a captain who is rakish and a lady’s man and a first officer who is stodgy and rational. But if you lift a star trek episode wholesale, you’ll also need to lift the back story. (You really can’t have say, the Pon- Farr story without the background of Vulcans, Spock’s own background, Kirk’s unlikely friendship with him, etc. WITHOUT stealing the entire setup for the universe. Or rather you can, but it will have no resonance.) There ARE ways to steal ideas without stealing them and without getting people annoyed at you. That will be covered but it’s advanced lessons.
Next up: That Idea Isn’t Yours. (And that’s not plagiarism, but how you can’t write a concept/pattern that is not “yours” – i.e. doesn’t fit you.)
According To Hoyt 
I like this. I just read a novel that could be called “The Hunt for Red October in Space.” The concept wasn’t new, the pattern wasn’t new, but the idea and the implementation were individual to the author and very well done (except for jargon, but that’s a personal thing). There is a certain comfort in seeing that the author maintained the *pattern* while staying true to his own idea. He successfully “filed off the serial number” and made it his own.
When it comes to my own writing, I know that I am a pantser. I definitely start with a concept and a vague idea and start writing, developing the *idea* as I go along – oh, I know where I want to go with the story, but how I get there is discovered as I write. Unfortunately, this means I either write 10,000+ word short stories or start novels that I don’t finish (actually *can’t* finish – due to time commitments).
Keep up with the writing guides, Sarah. They are invaluable, showing me many of the gaps in my own abilities.
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I read and reviewed that exact same book and found it to be excellent. Daniel did a great job of taking a uber familiar story line and making it original. Plus, there were a lot of things he didn’t have to explain because we all knew it from “The Hunt for Red October.”
Personally I’m hoping for more books in the series.
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Can’t say I ever start with an idea or a concept–just a scene that for some reason, I can visualize with great clarity. Everything I write is just a mechanism for bringing that scene to life.
And I’m not even artistic.
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I get a character, so I understand. I don’t divide these in my head, that’s not how I work. I know writers who do. They go “I’m going to write a story to illuminate x” I don’t. I start with a character and usually don’t know what the “idea” is till halfway through the novel. Or sometimes the end of the short story. I start with a character for whom it is intensely personal. But here’s the thing — It’s important to know these distinctions because when people say “there are no new ideas” they feel free to lift stories wholesale, and that’s bad. It’s important to know WHAT you’re doing.and it’s a good tool to analyze what you’re doing, and to sort of give yourself permission. Don’t stop yourself because your idea is just “boy meets girl” because that’s not the IDEA, just the pattern. Or don’t discard it if you think “It would be cool to have a character in a world with flying cars.” That’s not the idea, just the concept. It can be unoriginal. It means nothing.
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Scene, with characters, usually doing something. Then I have to sit down and start asking myself questions. Who are they. Why are they doing what they are doing. Where are they. And so on.
Sometimes the answers clash, and I have to go back, and rework them. That is one of the reasons that I’m now using Scrivener. The database in it allows me to keep track of things. I had one incident where I lost something, found it later, and had to rewrite twenty pages because I’d forgotten something important.
All the way through I keep on asking questions. Every new character I ask questions about. The culture(s). Everything.
Most of this won’t go into the finished work. I’ve actually written twice as many words background as I have story.
Wayne
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Well, I think of it as “ideas are cheap” but what’s expensive is creating a story from that idea. [Smile]
When you take write a pseudo-Star Trek work, you haven’t really created a story (IMO). You’ve just changing names to protect the guilty (you).
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Stealing is permissible when called “homage.” For example, the recent “Thor” movie featured three side characters — The Warriors Three — who had been knocking around Marvel’s version of Aesgard for decades. I doubt anybody ever complained about them being knock-offs of Athos, Porthos & Aramis.
Just as plots require a coherent back-story, so do characters. Being true to a character means that Rowling’s tale takes a different turn if Neville Longbottom was “The Chosen One” or if Harry gets tucked into Slytherin instead of Gryffindor. And any Star Trek tale takes a wholly different direction if you swap Kirk for Picard.
The fact is: Readers LIKE stories which are familiar concepts deployed in familiar patterns so long as the results are entertaining and sufficiently idiosyncratic as to not insult their intelligence.
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“Attempts to mess with the pattern to make them “totally new and startling” are usually unsatisfactory. ”
Reminds me of Campbell’s “A Hero With 1000 Faces”. There is a rhythm that all stories hold, at least the good ones. Finding that. Learning to tune into that, well that’s the prize.
This is similar to how I learned working with ideas. Ideas are cheap, the expensive part is doing all the work to make the hero’s trajectory fall in line with that of the villain, and the 3-4 other minor characters. As Pratchett would say, getting all the fiddly pieces to fit.
Not that it is any better, but I was taught that small ideas are called conceits. For example, over the holidays I came up with a conceit as to how our houses will be wired some 20-40 years in the future. This in itself is not a story, there’s no “people” involved. It came to me more like a white paper. Then, after this conceit started soaking in my head, I started thinking about how such a technology would be implemented, and by whom… And that’s when I got the story idea.
From my day job, the artists call their ideas “concepts” and the concept is thought of as something valuable, independent of its execution. Being able to come up with good concepts is a highly sought after skill. Music and song writing does something similar, but I have no idea what terms they use.
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It’s worth noting that anything in that ecosystem can be the starting point.
You can start with characters, observe their characteristics (!) and backstory, and find a pattern that fits. You can start with a concept, and either find characters that fit or a pattern that works. You can start with a pattern, and invent characters and concept in which it exists. There are many other ways into “the system”. Which to use depends entirely upon your own predilections.
Regards,
Ric
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