Taking Ownership of an Idea

As the lead judge for one of the world’s largest writing contests, I read a lot of stories. Very seldom do I see a completely unique concept for a tale. For example, I see a lot of stories that have vampires or werewolves or superheroes in them. I see tales about interstellar races, cloning, haunted houses, and so on.

Sometimes it feels as if every idea is so old, it must be worn out. Yet that isn’t so. If you look at some of the bestselling novels of all time, you’ll see that they are based on ideas that are a bit faded. For example, Tolkien’s work was based in part upon Germanic folktales and Celtic myth. His orcs, ogres, elves, dwarves, and wraiths had all appeared in literature for centuries. Yet somehow he managed to re-invent them enough so that they felt . . . original.

Many authors had written stories about kids going to wizard schools, but none did it as well as Rowling.

It is possible to be too original. Imagine that I wrote a novel set on an alien world, with completely alien animals and plants. I might create tapeworm people as protagonists, fighting a war with sentient slime molds. But in writing such a story, the truth is that it would be almost impossible to capture a large audience. Most readers would find that I was stretching their imaginations well beyond the breaking point.

As authors, we need to meet our readers halfway. Readers crave originality. As is often said by singing judges on The Voice, “The same is lame.” If a vocalist simply tries to copy someone else’s song, they may do excellent, but it will still sound just like karaoke.

On the other hand, we don’t want too much originality in our singing. A musician might be able to incorporate a lot into a performance—animal sounds, whistles, scat, yodels, snorts, grunts, various slapping and drumming sounds—and end up being so original that the audience doesn’t even recognize it as singing.

The same is true with writing. Even though readers crave originality, they need to deal with ideas and inventions that aren’t mind-boggling. Thus, the most popular writers tend not to use the most original ideas; they instead tend to make them their own.

How do you make an idea your own? I think that you have to invest yourself into it fully. You have to reinvent it.

Several times I’ve seen novels that have the Alfar—elves—in a science fiction setting. For a couple of the novels, the Alfar was just another race of space travelers. I worry each time I see that idea that it has been done to death and that no editor will take it.

But once I came across a writer who had written a few books on Norse history, herbalism, and magic. His name is Hugh B. Long, and his works using the Alfar in space are . . . different, more fully realized than others I’ve seen. He’s taken the worlds of ancient Norse mythology and reimagined them as military science fiction, where elves are futuristic explorers who once visited Earth, and now mankind must unite with them to fight a common enemy.

I think that he is succeeding in taking a concept and really developing it into something new, making it his own. Here is a link to his first novel.

Just remember: “The same is lame.” If you’re going to base a story around a familiar concept, one that others have used often, you need to really own the idea, twist it in a way that makes it new. Then, you need to create an intriguing plot and write the story beautifully, so that it becomes the very best of its kind.