September 25th, 2023

Most Ideas Can Be Good

I was going to write this post for the company blog when I was doing acquisitions at my previous job but since i don’t have that role anymore, I just thought I’d write it here for the general public good. I do think it’s something folks need to hear and, of course, has been said before but a reminder is useful.

It is of limited utility to try to come up with a “good idea” for your book. Not that you shouldn’t want the premise of your book to be excellent, of course, but instead of trying to get some sort of outside validation, it’s much more important to find an idea that excites you as an author enough that you’ll do the necessary work to see it through draft after draft without getting bored, to make an excellent book. Only the individual author knows what ideas those are.

This is not out of some pure-hearted “everyone needs to write their truest story” belief though I mean, sure, that too. I just have seen too many seemingly intriguing book ideas murdered by sloppy, nuance-free writing–and I’ve read so many fantastic, original, enthralling books based on such banal concepts as “people fall in love but there are problems,” “there’s a murder but who did it?” or “family through the generations is messed up.” A fantastic writer can make new the tritest concept but it’s very hard for someone who isn’t hard-working, talented, and putting in serious time to do very much with even the most ingenious brand-new never-before-seen squid-falls-in-love-with-banana rock opera (that one is yours for the taking).

Getting someone to evaluate your ideas without seeing the execution almost never works unless you are working in a very specific genre where really only a narrow set of specific concepts WILL work (sometimes romance at certain subgenres, a few others) or if you are working on something extremely topical and of limited duration you might need to have some guardrails…even then, if you’re a genius, you can get around it. During my brief period in acquisitions, folks would send me ideas and ask me if they should write them and unless they were really love stories about invertebrates and fruit, I said yes–I’d love to see it, but what I couldn’t say is, sounds promising, but how good a writer are you and how hard are you going to work on this? Because that’s what really matters. And if you have some holes in your craft–and don’t we all–you can just work harder, keep drafting, get feedback, patch’em up, if that’s the story you really want to tell. But for most of us, it’s only if we’re madly in love with a story that we’ll work that hard. Which is why other people’s opinions at the starting line don’t matter that much–the finish line is a whole other stratosphere in so many cases. Or it should be.

Of course if you are writer and you go to parties and–like a fool–tell people you write, someone will occasionally “give” you an idea and suggest you write it for them. It’s a gift, free of charge, all you have to do is spend three to five years bleeding all over your computer trying to write, edit, and publish it. What a freebie!!

You see? MOST IDEAS ARE GOOD, if you have the time, energy, talent, and tenacity to work with them to make them as good as they need to be. But most of us only have those things for a few ideas in our whole lives–and we spend it carefully. If you’re not going to invest it, even the cleverest idea won’t actually result in a good book, or a fun experience writing it. So…instead of worrying about who likes our ideas, it might be best to worry about whether we, the writers like our ideas enough to put in the work. Because you gotta love it enough to make it all worthwhile, is my opinion.