Is Your Story Idea Good Enough to be a Published Novel?
A rather scary thought for the new writer, but an important one: The average novel takes 3-7 years to complete. Yup, and that doesn’t include the time to submit your work over and over (and over) in the hopes of getting it published, nor the amount of time you will wait to actually see your writing in print.
If you’re going to spend so much time on a single project, you should be certain that your idea is worth the effort. After all, if your idea is great but not quite what it takes to fill the number of pages for a novel, you could spend much less time crafting it into a tightly-woven short story.
Taking a few minutes to ask yourself some questions about your novel idea will help you decide if your idea is, in fact, novel worthy.
Originality Really Counts
In more sarcastic moments, I often find myself staring at my story ideas and think, “There is nothing original left in the world.”
There aren’t too many themes to life, if we’re being honest. Love, hate, struggle, and adventure are the overriding ones which can quickly be broken down into the classic topics – unrequited or forbidden love, the hatred between a very good man and a very bad one, the struggle of a person overcoming misfortune, etc. Ugh, yeah, it’s easy to get cynical.
The trick is to look at the same themes in a new way. With every year that passes, things happen in our rapidly evolving world that show us old problems in a new light. We grow as people with every day we live, and our insights can change just as quickly. So the same old forbidden love story of Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story can become something totally new if we use the insights we have in the lives we live today. In its base core, the story is still the same theme, but it is told in a new way.
When you’re looking at your story idea, really think about this concept. You have to be able to tell the story as well as if it has never been told before. It has to feel new, fresh. If the idea you have come up with feels really familiar (and not just because the characters are living in your mind), then you might end up re-writing something that has already been done and will never be satisfied.
Please Something Happen
Plot is a very difficult thing to really understand. When something happens to turn your characters’ lives inside-out, set them on a quest to achieve something, and cause them to change as people âÂ?¦ you have a plot. I often try thinking in terms of a fairy-tale just to remind myself when I am getting stuck. The princess is a target for murder and she runs away to live with 7 funny little men and must grow as a person and mature through her time with them. Simplistic, but effective.
Your story has to contain a central conflict. It has to have at least one major thing which happens or there is no story. If your story idea doesn’t have a major conflict, a major something happening, which is central to the whole story, you’re not ready to start your novel. A good plot, or conflict, is something that if you decided to remove it from the story, the story would not exist.
Really look at your story idea for central conflict. Does it contain that element that everything revolves around, and wouldn’t be complete without?
Risk versus Audience
Depending on who you talk to, you’re likely to hear a lot of different opinions on whether you should write for the market or write for the pleasure. The purist in me wants to say that I write simply for pleasure, but let’s face it: I need the money to do that âÂ?¦ what’s it called? – Oh yeah, living thing.
You need to try and find a good balance between the audience and the original. Something original might feel risky, it resides just outside the mainstream – it isn’t something that you can find on bookshelves yet. If we concentrate only on writing what we think can be published, we’ll never allow ourselves to tell the story we have to tell in the way it should be told.
However, it’s also important to keep an eye on what is being published. If you’re going to spend the next several years of your life writing a book, you do want to get something out of it in the end. Balancing the needs of what readers want and the needs of your inner artist should result in something that is unique but publishable.
As you look at your story idea, ask yourself if you’ve gotten something that is an eye-opener, a shocker, or something so every-day that you might leave it on the shelf yourself.
Living With It
If you have made it this far through evaluating your story idea, you have only one thing left to ask yourself:
Can I stand living with this story the next few years?
Writing anything can be a struggle. When writer’s block assails me, it’s usually because I feel my confidence lagging âÂ?¦ usually because the idea I started with wasn’t something I cared to live with through to the end.
Writing a novel is much more of a struggle. It should be a fun process, most of the time, but dragging yourself back to the chair and pouring your thoughts out on the same subject day after day can become tiring. If the story idea you’ve come up with doesn’t get you so excited that you can’t wait to get writing, then you’re fine. You will spend more time with your novel than anyone else, and by the time that you finish it, you’ll know the story so inside and out that it will seem as if it is fact, even if it’s science-fiction.
After you’ve assessed your story idea with the previous ideas, and still feel that it’s novel-worthy, really ask yourself if you have enough interest in the idea to see it through to the end. Sell yourself on the idea, because you’re the one who must work on it.
