One of the most difficult things to do with a piece of fiction is to diagnose what’s wrong with it. That’s one reason we writers often pull in Beta Readers and other folks to offer up objective feedback, because as the creator and adoring god of our fictional universe we sometimes can see its flaws clearly.
Recently, while working on a novel I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a while, I was reminded of a basic mistake you can make when writing any fiction: Hanging onto ideas long after they’ve been proved to be not working.
Kill Them So Your Story May Live
Every story begins with ideas — interesting bits and pieces you want to explore. Sometimes that’s a character who pops into your head and demands attention, sometimes it’s a great sci-fi premise or a perfect murder mystery. And that main idea will inspire a bunch of other ideas that at first blush often seem perfect and foundational.
But sometimes ideas don’t stay fresh, and they can actually sour to the point where they’re actively hurting your story. But it’s hard to let go. Sometimes it’s the Fallacy of Sunk Costs that makes us think since we’ve already spent 20,000 words and several weeks of our lives on developing an idea we have to keep carrying it to the end. Sometimes it’s just the belief that if the idea was part of our original inspiration for the story, we have to carry it to the end.
You don’t.
Jettisoning an idea that might be cool but isn’t working with the story as it has evolved is tough, but often yields a burst of energy. That novel I mentioned earlier is set in a prison, and part of the original idea involved a group dedicated to planning an escape. The main character is jaded and disinterested in escape, believing it to be pointless, and I originally imagined getting a lot of tension out of that dynamic.
But as I worked on the story, I found myself continuously having to remind myself about the escape stuff, and shoe-horning it in. Eventually the novel kind of collapsed on itself, and I took a step back, trying to figure out if it was salvageable. I concluded it was — but decided I needed to lose the escape stuff. On paper it was a good idea. In practice, it was getting in the way of the emerging story I was interested in. Dropping that idea turned out to be the secret; after ditching it, I tore through a revision with renewed energy.
The moral of this post is simple: Don’t get too attached to ideas. With ideas, being “good” isn’t enough — they have to work. Being willing to drop a perfectly good idea is often the difference between a successful first draft and a novel that just sucks your energy dry and refuses to take its final form.
Of course, sometimes every idea is terrible, like that time when I had really long hippie hair as a teenager and went to my old Italian barber and asked for a ‘trim’ despite his clear hostility.