How to Know If Your Idea is a Good One
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.
Neitzsche said “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
This, and “god is dead” are the only quotations for Neitzsche I have retained from high school studies.
Neither is encouraging, but I am concentrating on the former now.
It seems I gaze, if not stare into an abyss of creativity most of my waking life. The abyss-gazing in my case consists of my attempts to radiate the warmth and light of the sun of my art out into a universe that quite clearly does not want it much of the time. It is in fact a shadow, a blackness, and total void of passion an interested.
Despite my often mentioned attempts to merely work for the process of it, giving little if any thought to the reception my work will inspire, I can no more avert my gaze from that abyss than an average B-Movie adventure character stuck on top of a precipice could heed the words, “don’t look down!”
Does the abyss stare back into me?
I don’t know. I guess in some ways it does. But unlike the concept I (think) Neitzsche was describing, I gain no further inside into who I am or what I am doing. It is just…an abyss into which I gaze, nay stare for much of my waking life hoping for something that is not there. And if old Friedrich is to be believed, the abyss finds almost the same level of insignificance gazing back into me during the whole affair.
It certainly seems not to pull anything of particular note from me as I sit here now, and ponder it, or when I do so any other time.
Nothing or artistic or literary merit, at least.
Then again, ir probably wasn’t supposed to. But then I wonder if I might be one of the few exceptions to the pronouncement in the first place–perhaps I do gaze into an abyss that does not gaze back.
“Write what you….” No.
“Write what you know,” is the oldest writing advice there is, as far as I can tell.
Did it ever apply? Does it still?
In a foundational, oblique manner, yes. If one has never once thought about writing before now, and is petrified at the prospect of starting, it’s the first light switch thrown in the darkness.
Beyond that initial crossroads of “try writing” and “never ever try writing ever” this well-worn statement is akin to telling a neophyte to chess, “just protect your king.”
Okay, that is the fundamental truth of chess play. Yet even if you lack all talent for the game, (as I do) you’re aware that two thirds of a player’s moves are not connected to protecting the king from direct assault. If “protect the king” is all the knowledge you have, you have nothing with which to work, even though it is the entire point.
“Write what you know,” is the first shove of the boulder down the hill. Yet knowing something does not a valuable topic make.
This is especially true in sharing our own experiences.
I have found that unless you are precious to the reader, or famous to the world of readers, nobody wants to talk about yourself as a starting/end point of a work. We know about nothing on earth more than our own lives and opinions, yet to focus our writing on this will bore everyone.
A better statement to launch a thousand writer adventures would be, “write what others want to know.”
Now that may be nothing more complicated than reader “wanting to know” the joke of your piece, of the twist in your thriller, or the catharsis moment of your story on a public radio hour. It’s all the same; a writer must provide what the reader wants to know, while remaining true to one’s self. The writing must come from a place of truth, or what one knows, but not simply be a mere recitation of “what you know.”
Now, how does a writer find a truth within them that can be transposed into a truth others want to know themselves?
Let’s put it this way; to continue the chess metaphor, determining this is equivalent to not only telling the chess neophyte to “protect the king,” but to do only in his head, without pieces or a board to keep track.
I wish it were simpler. The good news is, so do you, and in that sense you’re halfway to being a writer already.
What a writer truly knows is, how little they know.
As Fascism Burns Our Stories, Return to the “Campfire” To Save Them
National Parks. Presidential libraries. Museums. The National Archives.
All are both vital to the health and success of a free country.
And all of them have closed or come under threat by an aspiring tyrant and his billionaire lackey. Who knows what is next?
In these times of encroaching authoritarianism and the evils of the Republican Party as now constituted, the writing, telling, and above all preserving of stories is roughly 5 times more important today in the United States as it was before the Reich-inspired MAGA movement took hold.
And their value was already incalculable.
Depending on who buys what or caves in to the demands and preference of whom, this blog may or may not persist. Obeying Regime 47 in advance has become a popular past time anywhere from entertainment companies, to PBS itself. The time may come when I either have no access to this platform, or the demands of same on my content becomes so great I no longer make use of it.
In which case, it is back to MSWord and the old printer. Failing than the pencil and the paper.
I will burn a damned stick and write stories and thoughts down on napkins if I have to.
And I hope, pray I am not the only one to go to these lengths if/when needed.
If the institutions charged with keep out. hiSTORY alive are gutted, censored or burned up (figuratively and literally speaking) the story of who we are, were, and hope to be needs to be preserved for certain, and it will only be done by the dedicated wealthy or the resourceful poor.
We may take our cues from our past and a different kind of fire–the campfire.
Both facts and the telling of fictional tales must not be forgotten the midst of all of this. The epic tale, told by the village poet or chieftain around the community fire preserved the collective experiences of the tribe. The concept far predates the book, or even paper as we understand it.
Songs. Chants. On and on. They all told what was in many ways a fiction designed to keep alive the sense of wonder, or “more-than-nowness” unique to the human social animal.
When it is exercised that is.
The Fascists, with their gutting of the arts want to prevent such imaginative exercise. Let us make sure we do not allow it, no matter how far back to the Stone Age the try to send 99% of us.
So let the stories continues. Ad let us all familiarize ourselves with other ways of consuming them and telling them. Let us be ready for the campfire epics of history and culture again. not merely for the aesthetic–the natural conclusion to the path we as a nation are on now may require it.
Choose to Imagine
We think of imagination as an experience that comes to us–invading our tedious everyday to explode a mundane moment on behalf of our spirit.
We tend to forget that while “imagination” is a noun, “imagine” is in fact a verb. And like all verbs, in indicates action.
While inspiration or creative revery do exist, (and a wonderful feeling they are when they occur), most of the time we first choose to imagine. Especially as adults, we must make the effort to step into “make believe” as it is sometimes called for the sake of children.
Yet even children decide to imagine. True, they make the choice more often due to their inquisitive nature. They also experience imagination out of nothing, without making the choice, far more often than adults do. Nevertheless even little ones will declare, “this box is a car. This doll is the queen.”
I can’t tell you what to imagine, or even when to do so. Those elements vary from person to person. Time, schedule, health, willingness, experience and aspirations all determine what we choose to imagine and in what manner. The only universal is the decision to imagine in the first place.
The busier, more tired, more disillusioned one is with life and world, the more vital it is imagine. It will fade and store itself in the seldom used aspects of your reality if you wait for it to overwhelm you and your daily compounded tedium.
You must go to it, and you must see the benefits of doing so.
That doesn’t mean to sit in the middle of your living room and scribble crayon drawings of dragons onto old scrap paper all day. (though it certainly could if that’s what you enjoy. ) It means to ponder what is not. It means to transcend. It is to calibrate our thoughts to a greater width and depth of existence than we live day to day.
And, sorry to sound scary, but it is one oppressive governments cannot take from you.
Choose to imagine, every day, if only four five minutes before you sleep. The cost of shutting down your creative mind may just be greater, in the end, than sacrificing it as a result of a busy, tiring, chaotic life.
Ty Unglebower 