I’ve been writing since I could form legible letters on a wide-ruled pencil pad. It’s something that set me apart from my peers in elementary school, right on through Junior High and High School. I fought it early on, convinced that the very gift I’d been given, the ability to form characters and stories out of nothing more than a whim, and express them in a fairly coherent way, made me even more of a weird little nerd than my frizzy hair and glasses.
I once threw away two binders’ worth of my early writings to prove that I could be “normal” like every vapid teenage girl that I envied because they were popular. As if that is something anyone should aspire to, to be mediocre and subjugate themselves to some cookie-cutter ideal. Ugh. Unfortunately, at 13, 14, 15 years old these things never occurred to me. Youth is truly wasted on the young.
I still cringe when I think about all that effort, tossed into our trash with the dog poop. Certainly, none of my horse stories and teen romance attempts (very early and very innocent, nobody even french-kissed; it was all about as exciting as dry crackers, most likely) were ever going to win a Pulitzer, but the stuff was worthy of saving if only for memory’s sake. Luckily, eventually I figured out that narrating events in my head didn’t make me odd, and using the English language relatively well didn’t make me a geek, though it does (still) make me something of an anomaly. I’m constantly frightened by the sheer number of adults in authority positions who are unable to compose a basic two-paragraph business e-mail without dozens of spelling and grammatical errors.
*Side note to some of the people I work with: Spell check. It’s your friend. Get to know it. Please.
Now, as 40 rears its ugly head and I actually contemplate trying to write for someone other than, you know, me, I’ve stumbled across a startling and disturbing phenomenon.
A lot of the ideas I’m working with are not completely unique to me. In fact, and I swear to God this is true (and could someone who is also trying to write for publication please validate me here), as I read further into the genre I’m working within, it’s uncanny how many other authors are using ideas I thought were original strokes of semi-brilliance on my part. Here’s the other thing: those authors are, obviously, already published. So I can scream to you, Interwebs, as loudly as I like that the thing about the guy with the eyes and the dream sequences and every other effing thing was my idea back in 1992 and I have the longhand to prove it…it doesn’t matter. The notion that I am, indeed, working with my own characters and not copying Ms. Bestselling Author in My Hoped For Genre is irrelevant, humbling, and exasperatingly worthless.
These days a catchy concept sells, and once you’re published with X,Y, & Z ideas, they become yours, and everyone else who may have been working on a similar project but lacked the confidence to try to publish it until 6 months after you hit the best-seller list is just DERIVATIVE, a pale copy, an UNORIGINAL IMITATOR.
So now I’m torn. I’m frustrated. I feel like I’m 12 years old again, ready to throw away months of hard work with the dog crap because, damn it, every book I pick up to read when I’m not writing is already full of the ideas that I wanted to use. I start to question myself. Am I really just copying? Am I just another semi-articulate fan-fic writer glomming onto the great ideas someone else used well, and successfully, and trying to create a kind of coattail ride for myself?
I love my characters. I go to sleep with their exploits and I wake up with them. They don’t want to go quietly, and I don’t want them to, but now I’m stuck. Do I forge ahead and trust my ability to make the ideas MINE, not a copy of what someone else did? Am I ready for the inevitable comparisons, the disparaging remarks, the rejections if/when my work is perceived as a weak attempt to bargain with someone else’s brilliance?
Do I rework my entire 30K words so far, totally revamp my outlines and plans and try to make this into something different, such as it is?
Or do I scrap the entire concept? Put this project to bed with regret and begin anew and hope I don’t pick up another novel with similar ideas staring out at me next month, next week, next year?
I just don’t know. How many original ideas can there possibly be in the world? Every time I pick up a fantasy novel I enjoy, for instance, I’ll read a review somewhere in which an annoyed reader is dismissing the work I enjoyed as “so obviously derivative of The Lord of the Rings”. Well, my thought has always been, “So Tolkien invented a mythical world, and did a great job, but now nobody else can write about different worlds, groups of comrades on a doomed quest, and magic? We just have to stop at LOTR? Get a grip.” If pure originality was a requirement for good reads, we’d have about six books total to choose from.
I am well aware of my strengths and limitations, too. I’m no Tolkien and I don’t want to be. I’m writing a fun, fluffy piece of entertainment, not trying to break new literary ground or even get on Oprah’s book club. I have no illusions that I’m writing some hugely important work, but I still want to have it recognized that my writing stands on its own; I didn’t copy anyone else. Trust me, I spent months once trying to write like Stephen King before I understood that I was not him, and trying to copy him was dismissing me, for better or for worse. I was worth my own voice. I think I’ve found my own voice, and I feel comfortable with it, but this has thrown me for a loop. Exactly how much of my own voice has to be some stunning concept no one’s ever used (or at least not lately)?
Therefore, I submit it to you, Interwebs: if you find ideas you thought were at least somewhat original all over others’ work, what do YOU do? Press on with pride, revamp desperately, or abandon in despair?
‘Cause I’m stuck, and I could surely use the advice.
Go.
