An Idea Is Not a Book
By Greer Macallister | October 7, 2024 |
Many years ago, as a writer fresh out of grad school, I was precious with my ideas. After each new idea I had for a book, I worried it would be the last good idea I ever had. I swore friends to secrecy before I would even tell them what I was working on; when I found out a friend had shared the manuscript of my first unpublished novel with a mutual friend, I was furious. Not because she hadn’t asked my permission, but because I was struck with fear over what now seems like a silly question: what if that friend steals my idea??
Needless to say, my attitude about ideas has changed over time. I never worry anymore that I won’t be able to come up with an idea ever again. Time has shown me a few things about book ideas in general, and my ideas specifically:
- I will always have more ideas for books than time to write them. I have outlines, files, piles of research, notes, and much more for at least a dozen books I probably won’t get around to writing. (I almost made this a post about how to decide what to write next; maybe I’ll do that one next month.)
- An idea is only an idea—the book doesn’t exist until you write it. For those of us who write historical fiction inspired by real people, this is especially fraught, because it’s easy to get jealous of someone who writes a bestselling book about someone from the past you were thinking of writing about. When this happens, I remind myself that even the very same book coming out from a different author wouldn’t necessarily be received the same way. And in nearly every case, I had set aside the idea of writing about that particular historical figure because I didn’t have a unique or special angle on her story.
- While idea theft may happen from time to time, it is hardly a rampant issue. I’ve never heard any allegations of idea theft in any writing community I’ve ever belonged to, from my MFA program to critique groups to workshops to conferences and beyond. On the contrary: I remember when another writer in a workshop was inspired by a minor element of one of my stories and asked if it was OK to turn that inspiration into a story of her own. She did, and it was gorgeous, and if she hadn’t alerted me in advance, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the similarity at all. (Donald Maass wrote recently about an author losing the rights to their own idea under a Work For Hire contract; you can read it here. Definitely a powerful cautionary tale, adjacent to theft, but more nuanced.)
- Two books with the same inspiration can be very different and the existence of one doesn’t prevent the success of the other. I will never tire of the example of the two novels about Agatha Christie’s 11-day disappearance in 1926. They came out a year apart. They both hit the NYT bestseller list. Hard to argue that one hurt the other’s chances, right?
Not all writers work the same way, of course. And having plenty of ideas is not the same as having the right idea at the right time. But I hope this suggestion—that you try to regard ideas as raw material, not magic—might help some writers who guard their ideas (like I used to) open up to the world.
Q: Is coming up with ideas one of the easiest parts of your writing process, one of the hardest, or somewhere in between?
Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister earned her MFA in creative writing from American University. Her historical novels have been named Book of the Month, Indie Next, LibraryReads, Target Book Club, and Amazon Best Book of the Month picks and optioned for film and television. Her latest novel, The Thirteenth Husband, is inspired by Aimee Crocker, the Paris Hilton of the Gilded Age. Macallister also writes the ongoing Five Queendoms epic fantasy series as G.R. Macallister. A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books, she lives with her family in Boston, MA. www.greermacallister.com
Oh, I am flush with ideas. So many that I will never ever have time to write. I started a writer-oriented Substack called Experimental Wolves expressly to share those ideas as writing prompts to help other blocked and brainstorming writers.
I generally start with a little story from my life that prompts the very smallest seed of an idea, then I pose lots of questions and scenarios that could spin the story out in a dozen different directions, encouraging my readers to use it as a jumping off point for their own writing. And sometimes I take one of those scenarios and spin it our further to get into the detail of how it might go (and then I ask a bunch more questions about how changing up particular details might change the story).
What I like about this format is that it gets me thinking in terms of story, it helps other writers learn to ask the kinds of questions that lead to more depth of character and turns of plot, and I feel like I’ve at least done *something* with the idea, even if I will never take the time to make it into a novel.
All that said, my current WIP (historical fiction) is based on an idea I have been really precious about and careful about who I’ve told. 😆
Great post. I used to worry about ideas being stolen. Then I learned that you can’t copyright an idea anyway. It doesn’t become your intellectual property until you’ve expressed it in writing.
I don’t get as many ideas as my writing friends report, and a lot of the ideas I get don’t seem strong enough to carry a novel. Probably because I don’t find them exciting enough to develop. For me, the struggle is from idea to first draft, then excavating the story out of that mess and crafting it into something I’d be willing to put my name (or any name) on because someone might enjoy reading. Then the real work begins–trying to find someone to represent it and me.
I also have more than my share of text that is somewhere between idea and first mess that I couldn’t find a way to go forward with. Da Vinci said, “Art is never finished, it’s abandoned.” I want to add that in my case it’s not the only thing that’s abandoned. Some of those may even be worth going back to.
Thank you for writing about this.
Good post. Ideas are free and everywhere. What matters is the execution. I’ve always had too many ideas–it’s one of the reasons I like writing for magazines because I can test out some ideas in the marketplace as well as satisfy the itch. I’ve also discovered that speaking too early of ideas while they’re still gelling muddies them, so now if I’m mulling something, I just let it mull…
Whenever people tell me I should write about X, Y, or Z, I tell them to write it themselves.
Great post. What I often do with ideas that start to build up, is write a blog post to explore that idea. This helps me decide if it can grow and change into a novel, or become a short story. AND, sometimes the ideas we are hibernating appear in someone else’s work. Then it is best to remember THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN…and you can always work from there.
Coming up with a great idea is the hardest part for me. Something that is gripping and can be fleshed out. I have journals full of ideas that never go anywhere.
I think the fear that someone might copy your manuscript and sell it to somebody has been defused by the nature of word-processing and publishing apps, where the date is constantly embedded. But that is something I worried about when I started writing. Remember mailing a copy of your typewritten manuscript to yourself so you’d have an official postmark?
Ideas, though…. I wrote a fantasy involving genies among us on Earth. By the time I started trying to publish it, stories involving genies were everywhere I looked. Movies, books, TV. In retrospect, that’s probably why my book didn’t become a best-seller. Yeah, that’s it.
I actually have a very good idea for a book, and I did start writing it, but I can’t seem to get on with it. I even did a writing retreat with it with Heather Webb and Eliza Knight. They liked what I did, and I started to revise, but… then I got stuck. Maybe I should have just continued without revising until I had all of the stories (yes, it is more than one, that are connected) from start to finish.
I have sooo many ideas, and I write them down in brief (yes, I have a folder called interesting ideas). Few become full-fledged novels. An idea is definitely not a book as much as I wish otherwise (like when I come up with what I think is an AWESOME idea that fizzles a few chapters in.). So disappointing. But it’s pretty dang cool when one of those ideas does turn into a novel.
Ideas are abundant! An exercise I used to use with my creative writing students involved my taking loads of photos from magazine- people, animals, landscapes, even objects. I’d put them on the wall and have the students browse them till they found one that sparked an idea. Who is this person? Why is this dog alone? Is this hillside hiding secrets? Does that bottle hold a secret potion? I never had a student left uninspired.
Love this post! A great reminder that ideas are plentiful, but execution is everything.
New ideas are definitely hard for me. I really protect them!
Ah, Greer, your reflections resonate deeply. Ideas are indeed abundant, mere whispers in the wind until we breathe life into them through our craft. The true alchemy lies in the execution, the transformation of raw thought into compelling narrative. As you aptly note, the same inspiration can yield myriad tales, each unique to its creator. Let us not hoard our ideas but sculpt them, for therein lies the art of storytelling.