What's the Big Idea?

Let’s say you are looking for the next big idea for a novel. And one day, you’re perusing the paper, or walking around in a museum, or channel surfing, and bam! You come across someone or something pretty darn unusual. Immediately, the wheels turn, the story idea forms… but wait. It’s so different that you think a little research is in order. It wouldn’t do at all for there to be two books on this same unusual topic so you look and look and look and find nothing. Your heart skips a merry little beat as you sit down to write, write, write.

The day comes when it is finished. You type “The End” on the umpteenth revision and you sing a happy ditty as the email wings its way to an editor. And you can hardly believe it when just a week later, you hear back. The editor loves the idea but alas! Another editor down the hall is working on a novel WITH THE SAME UNUSUAL TOPIC.

What will you do? Or as Karl Malden said in that commercial years ago, “WHAT. WILL. YOU. DO?”

If you are Cathy C. Hall, you rant and rave, using language that no refined Southern Lady (or anyone, for that matter) should ever use. Then you decide that the universe is clearly sending a message and so you toast the years you’ve invested in your writing career and as you toss the wine glass into the fireplace, you throw in a couple of not-so-fond farewells: “So long, waking up in the middle of the night to jot down an idea! Au revoir to querying and never hearing back! Adios to endless mind-numbing revisions!” And you stroll into the sunset, older but not necessarily wiser.

Because after a few weeks, I remembered Big Magic, the book by Elizabeth Gilbert wherein she writes about this. This being the creative ideas swirling around all the time in the great ether and that sometimes more than one of us will pull out the same idea and go with it. Which sort of explains how writers or inventors or anyone with a creative thought comes up with what he or she thinks is truly original to find that it’s already been done.

It happens more often than one would think. But when you are a writer and it happens, you, like old Karl, must ask yourself what you will do. And maybe, you’ll answer this question in a more rational manner than I did.

Still, what it comes down to is really rather simple: do you continue or have you had enough? There are options.

You can shelve the manuscript in question and start something new. While you’re waiting to see if your idea and the book that comes out are the same, you’re working. Always a good thing.

OR you can go ahead and send your manuscript out into the world and see what happens. Because if you believe in this idea, and it’s a really good idea, then maybe there’s room in the universe for more than one book on the same idea.

Of course, you can throw in the towel, too. Perhaps this is the straw that broke the camel’s back and enough really is enough. But don’t be surprised one fine midnight (or later) when you wake up and scramble around in the dark to find pen and paper. Because you’ve just had the best big idea ever for your next book.

~Cathy C. Hall

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6 comments Big Magic, book ideas, Cathy C. Hall, Elizabeteh Gilbert, novel writing process, perseverance in writing

Friday Speak Out!: All’s Fair In Love War and Writing the Modern Mystery Novel

by Nancy Cole Silverman

As a writer I get asked all the time where do you get your ideas? For me it’s easy. I steal them. Now let me explain, for years I worked inside a busy newsroom and saw stories, the likes of which you just can’t make up. Fact is stranger than fiction. So when I retired and the cuffs-were-off, and I no longer had an editor over my back yelling at me to stick-to-the-facts, I decided it was time to play. Let it rip! Blend fact with fiction and let the bodies fall where they will.

I was lucky that Henery Press picked up my first book and with very little pressure – believe me I was used to a whole lot more in a newsroom – convinced me to make it a series.

In my first book, Shadow of Doubt, Carol Childs, a middle-aged mom, is embarking on a new career as a reporter, when her friend and next door neighbor knocks on her door and tells her, her aunt, a top Hollywood agent, has died suspiciously in the bathtub of her Beverly Hills home. Poisoned. Where did the idea come from? A news story of course. The day after an Academy Awards show here in Hollywood, I read an article about a Hollywood Agent who had been shot and killed as she drove home from the awards show. That in itself was terrible, but what followed in the paper was even more intriguing. The agent had twin nieces and had left a will in which one niece inherited one-million dollars and the other niece just one dollar. One dollar! I couldn’t let that pass. The story just wouldn’t let go of me.

In July, the sequel, Beyond a Doubt, will be released and as I sit here and write, I find myself rubbing my hands, hoping my readers and reviewers will enjoy my second book as much as they did the first. But I have a confession at make. I stole ideas for that book as well.

Beyond a Doubt opens with a body dump. Is the idea original? Not entirely. Years ago I woke up to the sounds of helicopters above my house in the hills where I live. Commuters had spotted a body and called the police. The story stuck with me, the emotion of seeing a body airlifted from the canyon, not easy to forget. Am I guilty of theft? Absolutely. The idea of a body being pushed from a helicopter isn’t exactly original, but it certainly is gripping.

My point is that as writers we’re like emotional sponges. We soak in all that we see and hear around us. We have to. To be authentic on the page, one has to be able to recall a similar experience from within ourselves, or that we’ve experienced vicariously through others. Whether it’s a scene we’re writing or the same gut feeling we need to show our character experiencing, we have to pull it from somewhere. To do that a writer must steal from all around him, blur the lines of fact and fiction, then wrap it up in from of a novel or a short story. It’s a larceny I can live with. I hope you can too.

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Nancy Cole Silverman’s new series with Henery Press is available in bookstores and online. For more information about Ms. Silverman, please visit her website; www.nancycolesilverman.com or her publisher http://henerypress.com/nancy-cole-silverman/
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Would you like to participate in Friday "Speak Out!"? Email your short posts (under 500 words) about women and writing to: marcia[at]wow-womenonwriting[dot]com for consideration. We look forward to hearing from you!

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1 comment book ideas, finding a story idea, Friday Speak Out, generating story ideas, Nancy Cole Silverman, novel writing

Friday Speak Out!: Why I Took on Racial Discrimination and Civil Rights in my Latest Book, Guest Post by Rosalie Turner

My mentor says that a writer is someone who can’t not write, and I’ve certainly found that to be true. While we must write, the question always arises, “What should I write about?” As a historical novelist, I love nothing more than to find some obscure person and expose them. My first novel was about Anna Kingsley of Kingsley Plantation in Florida. No one had really told her story and she was an amazing woman, a role model of strength and inner courage for all of us. Anna was born of royal blood in 1793 in Senegal. She was captured at the age of thirteen in a tribal raid, survived the horrific Middle Passage, and was brought as a slave to Spanish East Florida. I tell her story in Freedom Bound, which won an award from the Florida First Coast Writers Association.

After releasing two more historical novels–Sisters of Valor, which won a Military Writers Society of America Award, and Beyond the Dream, based loosely on my great-grandparents, I struggled with my next book subject.

For years, the story of the hundreds of black children who left school to march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement had captured my attention. I knew that 2013 would be the 50th anniversary of their pivotal march, so I decided to write about it as a tribute to them.

As with most things, the more I delved into their stories, the more impressed I was with what they had accomplished. In the 1960s Birmingham, Alabama was considered the most racist place in the country. African-Americans were completely segregated from the white population. The schools were segregated, the churches, the clubs, the waiting rooms and water fountains–everything. Blacks could not use the downtown public library; to get food from the few restaurants they could use, they had to go in the back door to order, then take their food outside. Overseeing and enforcing all this was the ruthless “Bull” Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety.

When Dr. King entered the scene with his non-violent protest, the adults in the black community were not interested in marching with him. They had too much to lose–their jobs, their homes, maybe even their lives. But the children weren’t afraid.

On the appointed day (known to them by secret code words from the local dj) thousands– literally thousands– of children left school and flocked to the 16th Street Baptist Church to march with Dr. King. Some came from as far as eighteen miles away.

And, yes, they were arrested, some even as young as eight years old, and yes, on the second day they were hosed and had police dogs snarling at them. The pressure from those hoses could tear bark off trees, and yet the children came back and marched again and again.

How could I not write of their courage?

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JC Penney Award recipient Rosalie Turner has been writing for almost 30 years. Her sixth book, March With Me, released this month marking the 50th anniversary of the Children’s March. Visit Rosalie at www.rosalieturner.com.

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Would you like to participate in Friday "Speak Out!"? Email your short posts (under 500 words) about women and writing to: marcia[at]wow-womenonwriting[dot]com for consideration. We look forward to hearing from you!

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5 comments book ideas, Civil Rights Movement, Friday Speak Out, historical fiction, Rosalie Turner

Discover Your Hidden Book

by Lynne Garner

When teaching, I often tell students that I believe most people have a book hidden inside them. Most students are surprised to learn that I believe this book is more than likely nonfiction. When they look at me in disbelief, I often use family and friends as examples to demonstrate what I mean. At the moment these are my three favorite examples of friends (and they are real) that I use:

• Friend one owns three dogs. She enjoyed the training aspect of pet ownership so much she recently completed a professional dog-training course. I am confident she knows enough to be able to write an informative book about dogs from the owner and trainer's point of view.


• Friend two studied garden design and ran her own garden design business. She also volunteered to help at her children's school. During that time she designed a child-friendly garden and gardening projects. I'm sure she could produce a great book aimed at parents and teachers who want to encourage children to love all things that grow. I also believe she could write another aimed at adults who want to design their own dream garden.


• Friend three is extremely gifted when it comes to crafts. However, she has decided to specialize in working with porcelain. I have no doubt she could write an informative book covering porcelain techniques and designing porcelain projects readers can recreate.

I hope you can see how you can turn a hobby, knowledge you have gained from your job or lifestyle into a book others will want to read.

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Would you like to discover your hidden book? Sign up now for Lynne Garner's class,  How to Write a Hobby Based How to Book, which starts on January 5, 2013.

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3 comments book ideas, hobbies, Lynne Garner, WOW class