Veive
So, you want to write a story about two twins who fall in love because they are that close.
Or you want to write a story about a girl committing suicide.
Or you want to write a story about a girl who finds out she's a princess from another land.
Okay, that's all well and good, but if you want to run an idea by me, I'm going to look at it, throw it in your face, and tell you to stop pimping your plot out and write the damn thing.
Why? Here.
1. The more agonizing you do over your idea, the less it means to you in the end. So maybe you're so insecure, and you're about to pore through your notebooks of writing while listening to Bright Eyes and trying not to drop tears on your scribbled fragments of ideas. You know what? The more you keep worrying about what other people think of your ideas, the more difficult you're going to find it to actually write your story.
Writing, as horrible and trite as it sounds, comes from the heart. Now, this isn't an excuse to write about whatever and pass off criticism because it's your writing and therefore is the purest vessel of emotion, but it is a reason not to let anyone n** you in the bud of some writing. Even if you're writing a horrible suicide-poetry about how your boyfriend broke up with you and you're so sad, it's going to have some emotion in it. By the gods, it'll lose whatever value it has when you try to change the basic concept away from something that holds meaning to you. And it's damn hard to write something you're not invested in.
So let your ideas grow and change; don't let people mold your ideas for you. That way they're still yours, and they get that distinct personal flavor to them.
2. You doom yourself to failure whenever you're willing look at an idea and say 'i'm going to scrap this completely." Let me let you in on one of my little theories. It goes like this: whenever we get an idea, it sucks at first. It's boring, or flat, or just needs more work put into it. Part of the common progression of stories is to allow them to grow. So maybe you got this idea about a half-demon and how he finds true love despite being stone-cold. And? What, you think this can't be salvaged? Damn right it can be. Having standards for your own ideas is good. Recognizing what you'll kill yourself before you'll write is also good. But when you take this lovingly crafted idea, no matter how cliche, and are completely willing to dump it in the garbage disposal and never look back? That's when you're losing some of your most brilliant ideas. Hell, take that half-demon and stick him in your Big Red Notebook Full of Snippets. Pull him back out when you think that, by golly, he might be good for something.
No idea is worthless. Except for that one.
3. An idea becomes original when you write it in depth. Hey, guess what? You want to turn that idea into something better and cool? How about you write it down? In the writing process, you get more familiar with those shiny new ideas. You know what that means? That-- gasp-- you begin to be able to develop them. It's not in the overall concepts or in the abstracts that things are unique. It's in the details and the execution and the way things fit together. It's in how you weave them into the stories we've heard before and how deftly you can put realistic spins so that it reads fresh and new and interesting.
4. Ideas by themselves are not original, and having them in your writing is equally not a guarantee of anything unique. You are not the first person to have thought of twincest. You are not the first person to have thought of a goth boy who is so alone who leaves this horrible, cruel life. You are also not the first person to have thought of whatever pretty, shiny new idea you have. The next time you try to poke something into a story and giggle coyly behind your authorial hand as if you have just created Adam and Eve, I hope to God that someone catches you and smacks some sense into you. You can't just present that shiny "new" concept and nudge and wink at the audience as if we're expected to fall all over you with the adoration of a million fans.
Yes, this means you have to develop things and write them realistically. Oh, the horror. Shock factor and pretty, twee little "tweaks" cannot substitute for characterization, good development, and well-crafted plotting. I feel this needs reiteration: You are not the first person to have thought of your idea. You cannot present it to us and have us still be shocked and surprised and not care if your writing is a steamy pile of crap.
What hopefully seperates you from the first person to think of that idea is that you're willing to carry it through and invest the time it takes.
Aren't you?
