How to Know If Your Idea is a Good One

tyunglebower ♦ March 13, 2025 ♦ 1 Comment

You don’t.

Sorry for the whiplash. Maybe I can soften the blow a bit and amend that be saying I myself don’t know if my ideas are good anymore, if ever I did “know.” So I have little advice to offer you on your own ideas.

For me it’s writing stories and nonfiction books, and of course posts like this, among others. For most of my life as a writer, I have only pursued a topic or a story if I felt it was in fact a “good” idea.

That’s not to say I’ve been off chasing marketing trends for my entire writing career. Sure, I’d as guilty of that weakness from time to time–all creatives are. Yet even as a new writer, I only ever pursued an idea if something about it felt like a truly “good” idea.

That was especially true of my novels, and to some extent, still is.

It came time to sell and market my work. And the short version is, nothing works. I have gone broad and specific. Reached out to strangers and/or friends. I try videos, I try promotions. I offer fiction or non-fiction. Twitter, (when I used it) an increasingly abandoned Facebook author page, more recently TikTok and even more recently Blue Sky have all been homes to various promotional campaigns of mine on behalf of my own writing.

The most recent, and one that I am still technically in active promotion for is my Autism memoir: A Fear of Butterflies. Before that, my most recent novel, The Rubble and the Shakespeare. In both of those cases especially I thought further ahead, and made more plans from more different angles than I did the promotion of any previous works.

In essence, by my own standards (and amount of spoons, for you fellow Autistics) I promoted the shit out of both books, starting before they were even published, as is suggested.

For what they were both campaigns, like all the others, failed.

Yes, perhaps I am still woefully inadequate as a self-promoter, despite my improvements over the years. Nevertheless, what I thought were “good” ideas did not catch on, even a little, with any target audiences.

Luck. It takes luck, and as far as promoting, I have had zero good luck at any point in my decade as an author. It is what it is. It sucks ass, but it is still what it is.

So, have all (and I mean ALL) of my ideas been bad ones? Have I never hit on a notion, a story seed, a character moment to a thesis on life in the case of my memoir that measured up as at least a “good” or “imaginative” idea?

Sales numbers say, no, I never have.

Am I willing at this stage to surrender the notion that all of my ideas are just plain bad? Not yet. Doesn’t numb the disappointment, but I have made an all-too-gradual shift in my perception of my own ideas, and by extension, the ideas of others. It’s what I said at the top of this post. In essence, you don’t know if your idea is “good,” only if it’s potent.

The shittiest of ideas have sold. Some of the best languish in obscurity forever. Luck, money and connections shift the odds only so far in one’s favor. On the whole, I now doubt we ever know.

I am converting to a model of idea presence instead of idea quality. If you idea continues to come to you more than a few times, pursue it. Not because that will lead to external success. I am proof it will not. Still, it’s a better metric by which to make creative decisions than “is this any good?”

The times when an idea will not “leave you alone” are about respecting your inner voice, (or the inspiration from elsewhere whispering to you.

To create is to be the artist. A lot of that blows at first. Yet it’s the answer I now give myself when I ponder if the next idea is in fact a good one.