Lakeworld and ideas

Yesterday I came up with Lakeworld.

I wanted to create a world that was very different from my usual stomping grounds. Something easy to summarize, but as unusual and distinctive as Mieville’s Armada or Le Guin’s Tombs of Atuan. The result was Lakeworld.

Lakeworld is made up of fourteen lakes of varying sizes, close together in a roughly circular shape. Narrow stone landbridges divide them. Different lakes have different features – the largest, for instance, is home to a herd of plesiosaurs, while another serves as a primary fishing ground/waterfarm for the population. Most of the people of Lakeworld live on its surface, on ships or on the back of a giant beast that nearly fills one of the lakes, though some live beneath the water.

So, why am I mentioning this? Well, aside from the fun of sharing it, I wanted to say something about ideas.

A lot of new writers are worried that someone might steal their ideas. They hesitate to put up parts of their work for critique even in private forums, or are reluctant to mention the details of a story in a query letter. On one occasion, I even read a thread started by a writer who wanted to sell ideas.

Is there a process to go through in which an idea can be pitched for someone else to write?

The reality, though, is that ideas are not just common, they’re distinctive to whoever works on them. Here’s an example:

A woman marries a man inferior to her in both social status and money, because she can't have the man whom she really loves. They have a daughter who, like her mother, falls in love with a man whom she can't have and marries someone else instead. She has a child by the man she loves, but the child dies. She loses the man in the end.

Margaret Mitchell made this into Gone with the Wind. Colleen McCullough made this into The Thorn Birds. Two very different novels, both very successful.

In other words, if you give ten writers the same idea, you’ll get ten or more different stories. The idea never stands alone. The writer will add genre, characterization, plot, theme and style, until finally it will be as difficult to discern the original idea as it is to tell which seed grew into which tree.

And each writer usually generates far more ideas than they can use, ideas that are better suited to their favorite genres and ways of writing than someone else’s ideas will be. So there’s no reason to worry that anyone’s going to steal an idea.

Lakeworld is a good example of this. Right now, it’s a thinly-sketched milieu, and I don’t know what characters are going to use it to enact which plot. The idea of the world itself is only the starting point. I could go anywhere from here – and so could anyone else who came up with this first, because there aren’t that many original ideas in the world. Lakeworld is original enough for me, though, and I look forward to telling a story about it.

Ideas for future projects

A previous blog post generated a good question.

How do you avoid getting so interested in these other, new ideas that you lose interest in your current project? That's something that happens to me pretty often.

I always have ideas for future novels kicking around inside my head, but I’ve only been distracted once from the book on which I was working. So this question gave me something to think about.

1. Ideas, like wine, need time to age.

In How to write Fantasy and Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card mentioned that his best work has come from joining two or more ideas that might have seemed disparate at first. My own take on it is that the original idea I have, the seed of a future book, is just that at first – a seed. The new book doesn’t spring fully fledged into the world like Athena from the head of Zeus. It needs to develop.

For instance, I previously mentioned my plan for a story where human conquistadores take on non-human natives – sentient wolves, to be specific. I originally came up with this in 2000 during a college lecture, but that was all I had for eight years – an interesting idea. I thought about it occasionally, but I couldn’t come up with any really different, edgy details to set the wolves apart from those in, say, Tara K. Harper’s novels.

Because I didn’t have that spark, I knew the story couldn’t proceed. So I set it on a mental shelf. I had plenty of other books to work on.

Then a week ago, I realized how the wolves could be different and dangerous – and how their human slaves would be unique too. And it’s the kind of detail which flips the telepathic-companion cliché on its head. I may have waited eight years for it, but the wait was worthwhile – I couldn’t have written this book back in 2000.

Knowing this about myself means that when I get good ideas now, I have to set them on the shelf to develop. If I start writing about them right away, I won’t do them justice. But what I can write about now are the stories that first occurred to me years ago, so it’s an ongoing process. Writers write; they don’t just plan and imagine.

2. Ideas aren’t enough.

I still can’t write the book with the sentient wolves. All I have for that is a fascinating idea – at least, one that I find fascinating. There’s still characterization, worldbuilding and plot to go into it, and I know that those require work. I can come up with ideas while looking out of the window of the subway train; to come up with plots that hold a 120K novel together, I need to sit down, switch my mind from “have fun ideas” to “focus intensively” and start writing.

Ideas are fun. Writing is the tough part. It’s easy to play with concepts, to build castles in the air. It’s a lot more work to describe and define the castles so that other people can see them – and pay for the privilege. So while I’m always receptive to ideas about future books, I won’t buckle down to really sweat over them until their time comes. Knowing just how much work goes into developing ideas is usually enough to keep them in the “potential future novel” folder rather than the “start writing NOW” category for a while.

3. Make sure the current project is interesting too.

If you’re ever distracted by a new idea, to the point where you’re neglecting your current work, try to pinpoint something about the current work that grabs your interest. It can be an interesting time in your world’s history, a character whom you like or hate just a little more than the rest, a climactic battle. Think of what makes each project unique and deserving of your time.

On the other hand, if you can’t come up with something like this, if the current project really doesn’t work, move on. Certain pieces are better off buried. When I was twenty, I wrote a story about unicorns, magical jewels and a princess, and I’m sure I could polish this if I could bring myself to read it.

No amount of kissing will turn some frogs into royalty.

4. Unpublished writers don’t sell unfinished novels.

Nuff said.

5. My critiquer expects me to finish the story.

I wouldn’t recommend this approach to everyone, but after I’ve finished each chapter (and made sure it ends in a cliffhanger and spellchecked it) I email it to my beta reader, who either shows interest, makes me laugh or requests more. Sometimes all. That’s a lot of inspiration to continue.