Welcome to Writing101. This first post is going to be about IDEAS.
Ideas area glorious thing. Everyone actually has them, but very few actually decide to act on them in any meaningful sort of way. Welcome to a kind of exclusive club, to which the only real membership fee is the statement that “I have an idea, and I want to try to make it into a full story”.
My name is Adrienne, and I’ve been writing for close to fifteen years (maybe longer). Yes, I know. I’m only 24 at the time of this writing, which would make me nine for the time at which I started, but I honestly don’t remember when I started writing, but the recorded documentation (aka the handwritten manuscripts I can find) date from about that time period. (I had turned one in for extra credit in a low level grade, I got a ‘great job!’ on it).
I know ideas. I know them well. And I know at least half of you are going to shake your head and say that someone else has done your idea.
My answer to that?
SO WHAT.
Why is that, you ask?
Because in this day and age, there are very very few “new” ideas out there. Take for example the concept of a “Dark Prince”. In a quick search I just did {see here} I searched for books containing the words “Dark Prince” in the title. I already personally knew of at least three of them (one of them shamelessly lives on my own bookshelf) – but when I pulled up that page, there were over 14 with some form of those two words in the title. That was just on the first page of results. There were 5 pages in all. I trust at least a few are duplicates, and since one is a Japanese manga (which are all known as ‘series name, #1’/’series name, #2’/ etc), I know there are a few.
The art of modern day storytelling is:
Putting a new twist on a tried a true idea. Half of those dark prince books involve vampires. Most of them involve some form of romance. Each book is unique. No book copied another.
Welcome to writing in the here and now. My suggestion for keeping up with your ideas: A notebook that either travels with you at all times, email drafts that you send to no one from your smart phone, anyplace you can write down or type ideas into whenever they hit you.
But, Adrienne, even after all of what you’ve just said, I don’t think my idea is worth anything!
WRITE IT DOWN ANYWAY.
WHY?
Because it teaches your brain to keep coming up with ideas. No one in the world said you had to use them all. I’ve got about a dozen .txt files spread across various hard drives, flash drives and other portable computer medias that are full of nothing but tons of jotted down ideas. I tend to spawn them out as prompts to start getting myself back into writing gear.
Will you share the prompts with us?
As soon as I figure out what the heck is going on in my daily world, I would love to. But at the moment, I have three jobs, 5 college classes, and an overdue ebook. I’m not looking at any text that doesn’t have something to do with my schooling, my jobs, or that manuscript that I need to rewrite.
AD