Ideas are unimportant!
Yes - you read that right.
What I love about being a writer are the random flashes of inspirations.
Those nights when you are just doing your thing, and the Muse comes knocking. You let her in and she goes: “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to write a story about X?”
You ponder a bit - yes, X sounds fun1. X is short-story material, or maybe a whole novel. Hell, given the time, you could write a trilogy about X. You thank the Muse, take a note, and let X simmer in your mind rent-free.
From there, one of two things will happen:
X will gradually fade away.
You will begin actually writing something on X.
If you get to step 2, it means you have an idea strong enough to push against every writer basic tendency to avoid writing. Congratz! You’re embarking on a new journey, had a strong idea, and are ready to commit to it.
However there are a couple of pitfalls to watch out for.
Ideas are memes, and memes want to spread.
Ideas and inspirations are just another form of memes. If you’re not familiar with the therm, a meme is2:
A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.
Memes where first introduced by Dawkins in 19893, but the concept dates even earlier4.
If you don’t believe that writing-related ideas are memetic in nature, maybe you need some convincing. What if I told you that every creative, narrative-based entertainment media can be described by its component memes?
Not only it’s true, it has already happened. Tv Tropes5 is a wiki-like site that lists the main ‘tropes’ for every piece of fiction listed. Go search for your favorite book and see it dispassionately dismembered into its core concepts. Of course, sites like Tv Tropes can only examine fiction that exists, and cannot list the thousands upon thousands of unwritten ideas that pop out and fade into an aspiring writer’s mind.
Tropes, memes, ideas - many words for the same thing.
You might want to write a book where a bad guy becomes good in the end. If you’re writing an epic fantasy or an action book, that’s a Redemption Arc. If you’re in romance, maybe a Enemies to Lovers. The whole Redemption idea is extremely popular, after all it’s in the bible… and way before that, in The Epic of Gilgamesh.
A statistic on originality
If you look back to the thousands of years of storytelling from humanity’s past, and look aside to the thousands of stories being told today, you will realize that it’s quite unlikely for a single idea to be groundbreaking.
Before we both give in to self-deprecation, let me say that being original is not the main component of being a writer. Especially not in the idea department.
Let me suggest a different metric:
An idea is only as good as its execution.
Which is to say - ideas are unimportant. Is what you put on paper, what you complete, that matters.
This is why we can tell thousands of stories about vengeance without getting bored, and why some people will think of The Count of Monte Cristo and other to Kill Bill. Different narrations on different media, with different merits, and yet they didn’t exhaust the vengeance-meme at all. New interpretations are always there for the taking; and even old ones are not trite, rather true and tested. They just need to be given a new spin.
Your writing ability is not measured by the strength of your ideas, rather by how you can make them work.
An abundance of Neon Cities
I stumbled upon this issue a couple months ago. I am writing a collection of short stories set in Neon City, a dystopian future city filled to the brim with cyberpunk themes and weird-horror magic. When I started, I was already aware that NC as a name wasn’t particularly original. After all, my Neon City was a reference to Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City, which in turn is a fucked-up Los Angeles.
Yet I was still surprised when I came across several other Neon Cities, such as:
A 1991 movie, Neon City 6
A Hong Kong-based record label7
An upcoming video game on the Oculus Rift store
An aesthetic used to describe cyberpunk, neon art
Furry artworks - because of course why not
Another writer working on a similar project
I hear you - maybe I didn’t do my research, and again the idea wasn’t the most abstruse to begin with. But this goes to show how we can be blissfully unaware of our own sources, of our novelty or lack thereof.
Ultimately - will my Neon City be diminished by those others? No. If anything, this goes to show I have a solid, niche base to build upon. Again: an idea is only as good as its execution.
The ultimate goal of today’s post
Assuming you read this far, and you agree with me, let’s talk about why I wanted to write this.
I don’t spend a day on writing communities without hearing a variant of this concept:
“I don’t want to share my work - I’m too afraid of people stealing my ideas”
I hope you can see how this is a misconception at best, a negative framing at worst. Ideas are hard to steal because the demand for them is low. There are countless ideas and most of them are not new. And even if you were to struck one True Original Idea™, you would still actually have to write it. Actualize it. Make something of it.
Worst case scenario - someone reads your idea and writes a book around it. The only way to fight this is to write a better book, or rather, write the book you wanted to write in the first place.
Again, as I showed before, there’s enough space for the Count of Monte Cristo and Kill Bill in this world.
Don’t be defensive of your ideas, rather be proactive in giving them shape.
Was this useful? Maybe you’d consider clicking on one of those two buttons?
Unintentionally, I captured Elon Musk’s state of mind when he decided to change Twitter’s brand into a letter.
Dawkins, R. (1989). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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