On July 29, 2023, Kasie and Rex answered a question that came up during Summer Series on Tuesday: How can I protect my idea? Short answer: you can’t. Here are the show notes:

Theme for the day

Ideas aren’t stories

Agenda

• What’s the difference between and idea and a story
• Protecting ideas (ha!) 
• How to put the words to paper and make something out of that idea

Link to Podcast

Segment 1/2

In Tuesday’s Summer Series session on marketing, a writer asked how she could protect her idea at pitchfest. She was going to share it with agents and publishers and didn’t want them to steal it or give it to another writer.

Interestingly, the same thing had JUST come up on an episode of Suits which Charlie is watching and I’m giving one ear/one eye to when I’m between songs on Spotify or stories on my kindle. In the episode, a writer wanted to sue the bookstore/publisher she worked for because she had shared an idea with her boss and her boss had shared the idea with an established author. That author then wrote the book and the publisher and store was selling the book. The writer, a clerk at the store, claimed she’d had other ideas that the publisher took as well.

When the clerk first told the lawyer this story, I responded, “Write the book. The idea doesn’t count until it’s written.”

Anyway, the story went on with the lawyer trying to help the clerk only to finally turn on her saying, that same idea could have been any one of these titles and present her with a stack of books. The point? Ideas are nothing. It’s the work of writing the actual story that counts.

So, after delivering this same advice to the woman on the Summer Series session I said, “Have you written the book?” She said no. I said, “Don’t pitch. Don’t query. Go somewhere and write that book. Then query and pitch. No one pays for ideas. They pay for finished books.”

So, let’s talk about ideas.

Where do they come from?

Where did some of your story ideas come from?

Do you remember their origin?

There’s a great scene in Working Girl when Sigourney Weaver has taken credit for Melanie Griffith’s work and Melanie Griffith proves the idea was hers by tracing the origin of the idea. What made the connection between two unrelated ideas? How did she decide to make this work in this way? Telling the origin of the idea wins the argument and the customer recognizes Sigourney Weaver for the fraud she is.

There are lots of prompts like these from the New York Times that can be used to generate story ideas. You can categorize them:

• Childhood: what was your most prized possession as a kid? What’s one thing you wanted as a child but never got? Do you wish you could return to moments in your childhood? Which ones? Why?
• Coming of age: what rites of passage have you participated in? How did they go? What do older people not get about your generation? What personal achievements make you proud?
• Family: how are you and your parents alike? Different? How do you define family? What are your family stories of sacrifice? How did your parents teach you to behave? What role do pts play in your family?
• Community and home: What’s special about your hometown? Have you ever interacted with the police? When and why? What are some urban legends about places in your town? Who would be the ideal celebrity neighbor? If your home was in danger, what would you try to save? Why?
• Personality: what motivates you? How well do you take criticism? When in your life have you been a leader? How did it go? How competitive are you? Do you consider yourself brave? Why or why not? Are you a saver or a tosser? What assumptions do people make about you?

Segment 3

Where do you keep your ideas? Do you write them somewhere?

Do you ever revisit those ideas for stories?

This list of 7500 questions to ask can help pull out the details of a specific story. This one has a cool matrix of topics with hyperlinks to the full lists of questions.

Do you brainstorm? Freewrite? Do you ever do any webbing? These are all prewriting techniques we teach in composition classes for early writers or people who struggle with organizing ideas. But do seasoned writers (us) use them? Why or why not?

So why isn’t your idea special? Because everyone has ideas, dummy. It’s doing something with them that indicates real work, talent, skill, or even energy.

Some reasons your idea might not be fully developed (other than you didn’t bother to write it yet) (link):

• Creativity – all stories are not the same if the writer can infuse his/her own creativity to them
• Know your characters – the real story isn’t in what people do, it’s why they do it. So you have to know these characters really well to make a compelling story
• Know your story world – the details are what matter here – the rules and the details; how well do you know the magic in this world? The baggage? The stakes?
• Know your genre – all genre have conventions, expectations, and the readers have them, too, so you should know them and either willingly and intentionally defy them, or meet them.
• Take the criticism – when readers (writers) tell you things are wrong with the story, hear them. Sometimes what you intended isn’t what happened on the page. Alpha readers tell you that.

Segment 4

Other ways to generate ideas include (link):

• Talk to live humans
• Ask a final question (“what’s next for you?”)
• Follow where that question leads
• Have an idea calendar – post the ideas to follow up on later

How to put the words to paper:

Start with an outline – first this happens, then this, then this, then that

Start with the character – first my dude does this, then this, this that

Start with a scene – put two people in the room fighting over the major thing in the story

Start at the end – where is everyone when the story is over? Write that scene.

Just Write:

Pomodoro method – set a timer and write the entire time, 10 mins, 20, etc. until you build up

Focus on the basics – just get the story on the page, even if it’s not finished or if you’re not sure what it’s going to be, just get what you can written