A writer acquaintance I meet for drinks once in a while is very critical of new TV shows, films, or novels; he’s really hard to please, and believes pretty strongly that there are, in fact, bad ideas for stories. I’ll mention a new movie coming out, for example, and he’ll complain that the premise has been done and it’s always terrible, so why would this new effort be any different?
Me, I believe firmly that there really aren’t any bad ideas. There are just bad executions of ideas. I think you can take any premise or plot twist or idea and create something amazing with it, as long as you take the right approach. The difficulty level is, of course, figuring out what that approach should be.
Worth It
I also believe that even failures teach us something. You have an idea for a book, you work on it, and in the end you have a steaming turd that you know you can’t show to anybody. A waste of time? I don’t think so.
Last year I wrote a novel that was inspired by some mainstream thrillers I’d read that had a Lost-style speculative twist. In other words, they were gritty thrillers, but had some kind of fantastic element to them. So I thought, heck, I can do that, and proceeded to write a novel using those stories as a template of sorts.
Well, I wrote a novel. And I was chatting with my agent and I mentioned the premise, and the first thing she said was “Well, as long as the twist isn’t XXX!” and then she laughed at how ridiculous such a twist would be. And yes, of course the twist in my story was precisely that.
So, I went home and stewed on this. I still liked a lot of the book, but even though it was just one person’s opinion, my agent’s opinion carried a lot of weight with me for obvious reasons, so I decided to revise. I still liked the idea—it wasn’t bad—but the execution was off. I kept the first twenty chapters or so and came up with an all-new twist, an all-new explanation for what was going on, and I wrote a whole new version of the second half of the book.
And yes, that second version was also: Bad.
The idea? Still a good one. I may take a third whack at it. Or it might find its way into a different book. Because there really aren’t bad ideas. There are just failed attempts at them. Unlike whiskey, which, let me tell you—there is bad whiskey out there, and it will change your life.