On Shiny New Ideas and Second Dates

Shiny New Ideas are kind of like first dates. ANYONE can behave for one dinner. Anyone can scribble conversation topics in Sharpie on the palm of their hand and seem witty for one meal. Anyone can put on clean underwear, a new dress or fresh white shirt from the drycleaners and look presentable. Anyone can look pretty decent by the warm glow of candlelight.

That's a Shiny New Idea.

But does it hold up to scrutiny on the second date?

Or the third?

When you meet its friends--secondary characters--do you start to scratch your head a little? Hmm . . . I don't know about hanging out with these guys? And that one, I am pretty sure I saw his face on America's Most Wanted.

And then there's that pesky issue of leaving the toilet seat up, not down. [Men: You can reverse that analogy.]

I have dozens of Shiny New Ideas that were just . . . fleeting dates. They looked good until I started analyzing them. Sometimes, you can take a Shiny New Idea and insert it into a new locale. You can dress it up in a tux and take it to the ballet. Or men, for you guys, you can stuff it into a Victoria's Secrets nightie and watch football in bed.

But it's only in fleshing out the idea fully that you discover whether or not it's "the one." I've seen this happen when speaking at writers' conferences. I was at one years ago when a writer said her idea was about a psychic detective. My next question was AND? That's barely an idea, let alone Shiny. And it was New to her, but trust me, that Idea had been sleeping around. Nope, you've got to go on several more dates with THAT one before you know whether or not he picks up his dirty socks.

Thoughts? How do you weed through YOUR Shiny New Ideas?

Something

My signing went incredibly well . . . a line of 100 librarians . . . face time with marketing (amazing people!) . . . a dose of culture at the National Gallery. Cocktails with two old friends.

So I'm wrapping up Magickeepers III, and like a bolt of lighting, I know what I want my next middle-grade book to be. Not only do I know it . . . I KNOW it--though it's more young adultish . . . and it's Something.

You see, we all get Shiny New Idea Syndrome from time to time. But then there is a process whereby you determine if SNIS is really like getting the flu. Or it's Something, a for-real idea you can use. Generally, what that means for me is I start working through the ins and outs. I see if I can come up with a elevator pitch, and then I wander through the plot in my mind. I see if the character in SNIS is unique. If I've got SOMETHING. And not just Something . . . Something different, Something that would make a room full of people say, "I can't believe no one ever came up with that before." If not, it may lurk in my brain for a while, but it goes to the great SNIS garbage pile as in "A kernel of an idea, but not growing into Something."

Not this time.

And oh-my-God . . . I turn in MKIII in a week . . . and I already know what I will be typing away on.

How do you determine if a Shiny New Idea is "Something"?

How Do You KNOW?

I was mid-way through a novel--I'm talking 100 pages from the finish line, when the idea of Spanish Disco emerged. Not just the idea, but the voice. Considering her voice was pretty much like mine, that's not surprising. But still . . . Cassie Hayes took up residence in my head, and I wrote the novel in months. It sold in about five weeks from start to finish of the process. That was my first published novel. my second completed novel.

Since then, I can't TELL you how many Shiny New Ideas I've had. Some I've abandoned. Some I've put aside, knowing one day, I shall return! Some I've written into full proposals and sold. Some I've written into full proposals and not sold.

So how do you KNOW which one to follow?

As I went to sleep last night, Demon Baby piled into my king-size bed, wrapped his arms around my neck, snuggled, shut his eyes, and was asleep in under three minutes. This, ladies and gentleman, is a record for him. He . . . never . . . sleeps. Like many mothers, I was enchanted by my sleeping child and rather than extricating myself from his pretzel-like hold on me, I listened to him breathe, I kissed his fingers, and I generally just enjoyed what, for my life with this child, was a rare moment of stillness. And in the midst of this, Evie, a character from my current Shiny New Idea, started talking to me. Relentlessly.

The ideas I finish are somehow mathematically proportional to the obsession of them. I don't know how the so-called Normals (nonwriters) go through life. I don't know if they have running lines of dialogue and other people's voices in their heads all the time. But I know the ideas that don't let me sleep, the ones that CONSUME me . . . they're somehow different.

So how about you? How do YOU know which Shiny New Idea to follow?

Crowded Around the Edges

A weird phenomenon has been happening lately.

My life is insane. I could go on and on about why and how, but four kids (one with a boyfriend who is here all the time), three dogs, two deadlines, assorted stresses, and chronic pain mean . . . life is more crowded than ever. Not too crowded (you can never have too many people to love in your life), but MORE crowded. More housework, more everything. I even have a new blog starting (announcement within a week, I think).

And so, despite major Shiny New Idea Syndome, I have simply told my brain "Uh-uh, not today. No time for that. SHUT UP!"

And so what does my brain do?

On the EDGES of my crowded life, it sends me signals. I walk past an open book and think, "What if . . . " I imagine magic happening. I find myself stuck at a light and thinking, "What if this character came back from the dead and was EVIL . . . how would that work?" I think of new idea after new idea. But not indulging it yet. Trying to shove it away. But then finding it creeping on the periphery.

Conversations spark ideas, so much so that I have to FOCUS on the talk in the here and now.

A song.

A person walking by.

A newspaper story.

Doesn't matter. All of it . . . crowded on the edges, I presume waiting for the full-on go-ahead. But deciding to push at me anyway.

Anyone else have this happen to them? Does your imagination respect boundaries?

Half-Baked

I'm back. Fifteen hours in the car with Demon Baby. Do the math. I feel like I have been slugged with a sack of rocks.

But . . . that isn't to say I am without a writing post. However, the title of this post can refer to my brain today . . . or the point of my post. Or perhaps both.

Ever meet someone who wants to write a book and they approach you with what they think is a really cool idea. Only the idea is sort of a fragment. A lot of times the really cool idea is either an interesting character or a single element of a thriller-esque plot--a heist, a caper, a con, a person about to blow up the president.

My reaction is usually . . . AND? A fragment of a cool idea is simply a cake that is half-baked. A werewolf is not an idea for a book. A werewolf who is a vegetarian isn't even an idea for a book. The risk when you start full-speed ahead with a half-baked idea is it may never bake. The cake may never rise. There's just not enough ingredients.

So it was that I was driving when I came up with a totally amazing Shiny New Idea. This was about two hours into my trip. Out of nowhere I had an idea for a late-YA, and even a character name--Lark. And I knew she was special. It's a fantasy idea, and Lark has a special skill I have never seen done in a book before. A mythology that came to me fully formed. A half-baked idea.

You see, just because Lark has this certain gift, and just because it's original, and just because it has dramatic possibilities, doesn't mean she's anything more than a character running around in my brain.

By the fourth hour, I had the mythology more organized. I had a historical placement for Lark's lineage in the Russian Revolution. I had her great-great-grandmother . . . I had a dramatic prologue.

Lark was still half-baked.

By this time, I was heading into a driving rainstorm in Georgia with a trucker who decided to eff-with me on the road. I had to concentrate. Ahh, the joys of driving alone with three children in the car. I stopped for coffee, giving the trucker time to go find someone ELSE to bother.

Back in the car, the driving rain meant intensity, but Lark kept coming into the fringes of my head. By hour five, she had a voice. By hour six, she had a mother, and a reason for escaping her father and coming to a new town.

By hour eight, she had a love interest. And the idea was starting to go from half-baked to baked. Her love interest was VERY different, and there was a natural collision course between her special skill and his special need.

Three hours later, I realized the theme was free will and personal choice. Always good to have a theme.

I had the villian. I had the darkest of dark moments. I had what everyone looked like.

I had a full-risen cake . . . um . . . book.

Of course, now all I have to do is write it.

But the bottom line is a book is more than the sum of its parts . . . and yet it is the sum of its parts. Cool ideas aren't books. Neither are interesting characters. You need all the ingredients.

Thoughts? Or am I merely half-baked today. (Don't answer that!)

Peace,
E

Living in the Words

Last night, I brought a potential middle-grade proposal to my critique group. The previous meeting, I had brought a potential late-YA proposal. Just two chapters each, I was playing with two Shiny New Ideas.

The YA is very literary, unlike anything I have written before. There are two narrators. I think I nailed one, and the other I am struggling for a speech tic in order to make him sound more distinct. I know it'll come to me. The middle-grade has a great hook, though I faltered in a spot or two on voice. But I feel confident if I wrote it, it would sell.

And two of my group said, in essence . . . "I really think you have more enthusiasm for the other book. The late YA. Something about it." After years together, we know each other in ways our spouses, or significant others, or other friends don't. It's not the same relationship type, of course, but there's an intuitive bond that develops in a good critique group. We live in each other's words.

And they were right. The other book, I think about a lot. Not only when I am at my computer, but when I am hunting for pumpkins in the pumpkin patch with my kids, or when I am falling asleep, or when I am driving my car. Scenes come into my head. I can literally SEE the "big reveal" in my head in pictures, like a movie. I think about speech patterns. I think about what each character has to lose and has to gain. I think about the idea that you could love someone so much that you would give up all you had just to be with that person. I think about Death. I think about Life. I think about why people are so afraid to die and why they waste so much of the life they have to live.

The book calls to me.

And here's the thing. Many of us spend a lot of time wondering what's hot in the marketplace, who's buying what. I have a lot of aspiring writers actually "pitch" me a sentence or two of an idea and ask, "Do you think it could sell?" They'll email me with ideas. And somehow, maybe some of that is backwards.

It all goes back to, I think, writing what you are passionate about. What calls you. And, in this case, writing the one book I think I am the only person who can write. That's not arrogance, but the two characters are so unusual . . . it's mine and mine alone.

I live in the words right now. And that tells me something.

Thoughts? Do you live in the words?

POP!

I fell asleep in Baby Girl's comfy queen-sized bed last night as we talked about our day. Woke up, like I always do, before the alarm went off. And when I woke up, I had an entire scene pop into my head for a book . . . that until then had only been a kernel. Not just a scene, but dialogue and character names, setting, the whole nine yards. Other people wake up and maybe stumble to the coffee pot, I shut my eyes and "wrote" it all down in my head. Pausing the action once in a while to change a name, or add a detail. Within ten minutes, I knew where the book was going, how it would end. I even had the title.

But here's the thing . . . this has been a book I have been scribbling in my Daytimer for months now. See, I am a dinosaur. I have not yet gone over to one of THESE. Instead . . . . I keep a Daytimer. And each week, I write down all the titles of all the unwritten books and ideas I want to get to eventually. Most have titles. This kernel of an idea was just that. A scribbled word. As a writer, as an editor, I knew SOMETHING was there. I just wasn't sure WHAT. The kernel was nothing more than a single character answering an unusual want ad. That was it. I knew what the ad said. Knew who the character was (what she did for a living). I didn't even QUITE know who placed the ad.

Weeks went on. Dutifully, I kept writing "WANT AD" on my Daytimer. Nothing more would come to me. No names. No faces, really. Just . . . a firm hunch the idea would pan out. Maybe now, maybe a year from now.

And then this morning. Voila. Names, characters, one-liners, dialogue, and . . . finally . . . the man who placed the want ad. Then a book structure took form. WHY the man placed the ad, and WHY he won't even show his face to the woman who answers the ad. Where he lives, what furniture he has. His piano, even. Who works for him. Tapes and movies he gives to the woman. Why there are no pictures in his house. I don't want to give a single thing away because there is a really, really cool hook, so I'll leave that be as far as the blog.

But the kernel is now an unwritten book. I don't outline, so basically, I start at the opening line . . . and write until it's done. Easy, right?

Now, I wish I knew why some kernels pop . . . and some never do. THAT, I suppose is one of the mysteries of the universe, or at least my brain. Why do you get a bag of microwave popcorn . . . and some kernels just sit there, stubbornly refusing to pop at the bottom of the bag. I don't know. But this one popped.

So that's my idea process. How about yours? Do some things pop like that? Or do you have old kernels in the bottom of your bag that simply refuse?

More on SNIS

Yes, more on Shiny New Idea Syndrome. A quote to ponder:

"A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."~Oliver Wendell Holmes

In my life, I can remember a few moments that very much embody the Holmes quote. One time was when I read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. I was in the hospital battling Crohn's disease, and as usual, I approached hospitalization like I was being punished and said to my doctor, "How soon until I get out?" Hospital was like prison, at least in my mind. I viewed every stay as pushing myself as fast as possible to get released, and beware any poor doctor who said, "Maybe Tuesday," because by Monday night, I'd be bugging them to process me out. But this time I was hospitalized, I was in such bad shape that the doctor was measuring my stay in WEEKS and MONTHS, not days. His answer was "You're going to be here for a long while."

I was understandably devastated. By about day five, I was so homesick, I didn't think I'd ever get better because I had a broken heart missing my daughter (an only child at the time) so much.

A friend of mine recommended the book, and I was so sick, I remember I could maybe get through a page or two at a time. But eventually, as I got better, I whipped through it. Then I proceeded to start all over reading it again. And then again. My copy has pages falling out and is held together by rubber bands. And I remember the most unusual sensation. My brain felt like it had exploded. The concepts were so amazing, so true, so life-altering, that I knew my life would be measured by who I was before the book, and who I was after.

So it is, in a smaller way, with SNIS. Once an idea is up there in my brain, it becomes this living thing. There's no putting it "back"--no pushing it into a closet or beating it back into submission. Even if I NEVER write the book that's dying to be written, my brain is forever changed by it's being there. Which is one of the wonders of creativity and the human mind.

So has an idea . . . or a book . . . changed you? Stretched you to new dimensions? Thoughts?

Scribbling Down Ideas

So I was in the middle of Oldest Daughter's graduation ceremony. I was crying. I was listening to her play violin with the orchestra.

And the first line of a new book flew into my head.

To be sure, I always suffer from Shiny New Idea Syndrome. They don't make a rehab for that, do they?

And this new idea is one I have been toying with--just toying in my head--for a few months. Originally, I thought it was a work of women's fiction. But now I am thinking it's a late-YA. And then . . . the first line! The first wonderful, fabulous line which means it's now more than just this cloud of an idea. It's SOMETHING.

I looked in my purse for something to write on, and ended up tearing off a piece of cardboard from the box I keep my Epi-pens in. I wrote it down . . . the first line. And stuck it in my wallet.

My Significant Other looked over at me like I was nuts. "What are you doing?"

Meanwhile, I am STILL sobbing over Oldest Daughter. Still there at the graduation. I leaned over and whispered, "New first line for a book."

By now, my family just knows I am weird, so he just nodded.

But inside, I was elated. In the midst of this crazy day, I get my first line. Not only that, I got the two main characters Clear as a summer day.

This happen to anyone else? Where do you scribble when you get an idea at an inconvenient time? Do random lines come to you out of nowhere? Are we really ALL just insane?

We Interrupt This Program . . .

First . . . on my iPod is a killer song by Arcade Fire. And I am now a redhead!! Dyed it last night myself. Also cut my own hair. Kind of dangerous, but it looks good.

Second . . . how do you know when you have Shiny New Idea Syndrome versus "maybe I should put aside the work in progress to work on this new idea because it's what editors are buying"?

True story . . . I was writing a book about a Vietnam vet and a member of the IRA intersecting lives over a woman. And then I had the idea for Spanish Disco and wrote it in four months, nailed the voice for it (I think), sold it in a couple of months (well, technically I didn't . . . my agent did), and the rest is history, blah, blah, blah. The other book? Still on my computer.

Many times, I will abandon a work in progress to try to hit the curve of a trend. Most of the times, that gamble has paid off. And most of the time, I do go back and finish those abandoned books because I am still passionate about them. And then sometimes I sell them. This book was one I abandoned and then returned to and sold.

And striking while the iron is hot is a good thing. After all, by the time you spot a trend, it's often on its way to a glut and then good luck trying to sell in the market.

But the clue that it's just this flitting from project to project versus a sheer market and business decision . . . I think . . . is in the results. As in, do you ever fully finish something or are you afraid deep down inside so it's easier to chase waves of industry trends than complete, fully, one novel and try to land an agent and a book deal.

I have had many a very new writer approach me at signings and appearances and ask whether they can "sell an idea." As in write on even LESS than a proposal. On an idea. Or can they write a chapter and "get paid" to finish. There's a reason this occurs very, very, very, very rarely to new writers. A publisher has to know you have it in you to finish. That you won't freak out in the middle of a book and realize you have no way to write yourself to the end.

So when you interrupt a current work in progress to try something new, something you feel in your heart can sell . . . ask youself . . . do I always do this? Or do you KNOW you'll finish this new thing and then maybe return.

Thoughts???