Getting the Right Idea About Ideas
One Little Piece of Advice That No Creator Wants to Hear
“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”
—Chinese Proverb
One of my earliest memories of my writing being encouraged was when my dad helped me put a little story I had written into an envelope and mail it to myself. When it arrived back at our house, I left it sealed and put it away in a drawer. Sealed up with a postmark date on it, he explained, it would be protected if someone tried to steal my story later. I could prove I had the idea first. Now defunct thanks to the Internet, this used to be the poor man’s copyright system. It must have worked because to date no one has stolen my no-boys-allowed teenage-girl-ninja-assassin cheerleading club story.
Look, I’m not going to bury the lede today. I’m going to come right out with it. Prepare yourself.
Ideas
Aren’t
Valuable
They’re just not. Today’s article is about how to get past the idea that your ideas are precious and valuable—because they’re not—and how to turn them into something that does have value. Contains bonus information on how and where to get ideas—as many as you want or could ever use—completely free of charge, in case your personal supply ever runs low.
I’m an editor by trade and I’ve spent my whole career working in various publishing environments so I hear the following thing often. Incidentally, my partner and my best friend are both in tech and they hear the thing too, just regarding applications, websites, or businesses instead of stories. Here’s what all of us are hearing all the time:
“I’ve got this idea for [a product or story], but”
What comes after that “but”?
But I’m not a writer—so I’m not sure what to do with it. Can you write it for me and we’ll split the royalties?
But I’m not a developer—so I don’t know how to build the app. Do you want to go in 50/50? I’ll be “the idea guy” and you’ll be “the tech person.”
But my idea is so good that if I pitch it to an agent, publisher, or tech or media company—I know they’ll steal it for themselves.
Now, I’m not saying you should take that idea and throw it in the garbage because it’s worthless. What I’m saying is that, on its own, it doesn’t have inherent value. In case you don’t believe me, I’ll prove it.
You can’t patent an idea. You can’t trademark it, you can’t copyright it. If a person or website is out there promising to help you patent, trademark, or copyright your idea, they’re blowing smoke.
Copyrights only protect original works of authorship. For instance, novels, plays, songs, poems, software, or architectural designs.
Trademarks are only for words, phrases, or symbols that identify the source of the goods of one party from those of others. For instance, brand names, logos, and slogans.
Patents only apply to inventions. For instance, machines, manufactured articles, industrial processes, and chemical compositions.
Everything of value on this planet has a means of protecting it from theft. Your house has a lock to keep your belongings safe. Your bank and your credit card company have encryption to keep hackers away from your money and data. If ideas had value, there would be a mechanism to protect them from being stolen. The legal protections above are in place to protect the products that grow out of ideas, because those do have value. But the ideas themselves aren’t worth inventing a method or a law to protect them.
Publishers and literary agents are not out there stealing writers’ ideas. We would not be in business if we were. Our whole business model is purchasing the rights to publish and distribute writing. If you come at a publisher or an agent with writing that is good and that they think they can sell, they’ll sign you and pay you for the privilege of signing you. If whatever you bring them isn’t good enough for them to sign or they know they can’t sell it—well, then, why would they steal it?
Okay, so why don’t ideas have value?
First of all, pretty much everybody has ideas. Some people have more and some people have fewer but every brain is capable of creating ideas. Your brain has so many ideas in it all the time that it shows you original movies while you’re sleeping just to unload some of the overflow. That’s how the world got Twilight.
Second, ideas are available all over the place, for free, all the time. At the end of this article I’ll share some specific places you can go any time of the day or night to get a totally free idea to start writing. But also consider that human beings have been writing stories since Enheduanna put stylus to clay in the 23rd century BCE. You’ve got 4500 years of humanity’s story canon to comb through and you can just take any one of those ideas and make it your own. People do that all the time. It’s completely legit.
How many retellings of Romeo and Juliet do you know? I thought of five in five seconds. You can take something you love and retell it from another viewpoint, like Jean Rhys did with Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea (and won a Cheltenham Booker) or John Gardner did with Beowulf in Grendel (which earned him a Mythopoeic nom). You can take some characters you already love, slap new names on them, drop them into a new plot, and before you know it you wrote Fifty Shades of Grey and someone is handing you $10 million for it.
Third: Take any idea. Give it to five different writers and stick them in front of five different typewriters. They will come back with five stories so different that it will be hard to believe they originated in the same idea. If you look back at my September 15 article on Plot, Story, and Storyline, you’ll see that I gave away a story idea from my own vault totally free. Was I worried someone would steal it? One of my lovely Shelf Life readers, who knows who he is, took it and ran with it and turned it into his own story and the story he came up with is completely distinct and different from the story that I made from the exact same idea. If you read both you would never guess that they grew from the same seed.
Look: If I have an idea, and it’s cool, I actively want people to take it and use it. I want to read more stuff that comes from the ideas I think are cool. Who doesn’t want that?
The belief that ideas have intrinsic value harms writers more than it helps them. Writers who feel they need to vigilantly defend their idea from thieves, for instance, aren’t likely to let others beta read their work and provide the feedback they need to grow and improve. Personally, I have a few “pet” ideas that are my absolute favorites and I’m always hanging back from getting started on writing them because I don’t want to “waste” my best idea until I’m somehow more ready to write it. What would it mean to be ready enough to tackle one of my babies? I have no idea. I’m still trying to figure that out. But my belief that some of my ideas are too valuable to use is 100% holding me back from creating cool content.
If you want your idea to be valuable, you have to use it to create a product. Here are some things you can make from your ideas that have real, demonstrable value:
An outline of your novel
A pitch for a screenplay or TV show
A proposal for a textbook or nonfiction book
A graphic novel script
A picture book dummy
A draft of a poem or lyrics for a song
A short story
You can copyright these things. You can take them to an agent or an editor and sell them. The difference is the time and effort that it takes you to grow that idea into a product. A cherry blossom seed costs less than a dollar but a 4-foot sapling is $70+ and a 6-foot tree is double that price. The time and care that a human being put into nurturing and growing the tree makes the difference. A full-grown tree with an established root system? You can buy those. They are not cheap.
Look at it like this: Can you walk into a bank with an idea for a business and reasonably expect to get a loan? You can’t. But if you show up with a business plan you created from that same idea—now you’re in business. So to speak.
As promised, here are some places around the Internet where you can go right now to get an idea to start writing if your idea bucket is empty or if you just want a throwaway idea to get the creativity flowing before you tackle your real work:
diyMFA’s Writer Igniter. The diyMFA program is not free, but their writing prompt generator is. This tool is fun to use and the combinations it comes up with are wild. It spins like a slot machine and then gives you a character, a situation, a prop, and a setting (photograph) to get you started.
/r/WritingPrompts. You don’t need a Reddit account to use this forum. The user community posts writing prompts on here all day long—each one thought up by a real human brain. Sort by “hot” to see the prompts with the most community upvotes or sort by “new” for a mixed bag of weird stuff. Pro tip: The tag [WP] stands for “writing prompt” while [EU] stands for “established universe” (eg, a Star Wars or Harry Potter prompt). There are other prompt tags as well as an applet that lets you filter by the kind you want.
Plot Generator. Just what it says on the tin. This site will generate a random plot for you, but it can do so much more. It can give you an opening line to run with, help you name a character, give you a plot twist to spice things up, or even throw you some ideas to restart a stalled story. Bookmark this to click whenever you get stuck.
There’s books of writing prompts, sites with hundreds of writing prompts—tons of resources out there to explore. I love these three specifically because they are evergreen. No matter how many times you use them, they’ll always have a brand new idea waiting for you the next time you visit.
So if you’re out there sitting on your stock of ideas like Smaug on the Arkenstone—stop that! Use those beautiful, brilliant ideas to build some incredible content. The best time to start is right now.
TL;DR: Take your favorite idea and plant it today to start it growing into something priceless.
Coming up on Tuesday—How do you put a price on words? What do they cost, and what is their value? If you’ve ever wondered how people get paid for working with words, how books get their prices, or how to price your own book or writing project, Tuesday’s article is for you. Subscribe so you don’t miss it!
PS—Ever wanted to try something like NaNoWriMo but felt your project wasn’t a good fit? Wishing you could participate in a writing community challenge in November but not up for the pressure of NaNoWriMo Official? The Shelf Life Discord is hosting a NaNo Club for anyone who wants to participate in any capacity, for any type of writing project. Want to write poems? Songs? Blog posts? Short stories? A non-novel long-form book? Choose your project and then set your own goals, mile markers, and schedule. We would love to have you.
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