Coming up
with a great idea for a book isn’t all that hard. Lots of people — maybe even
most people — do it at some point in their lives. Great ideas are a dime a
dozen. It’s the ability to execute that matters.
The problem
is that a great idea is like a good seed. Planted and properly cultivated it
can grow to majestic proportions, but it can also die underground without
putting up the most meager of sprouts.
Viewed in
that light, the great idea is properly understood as but the beginning of a
long-term project. What goes into turning a great idea into a compelling book
is something like what goes into turning a piece of cotton into a sweater, only
harder. Much harder. Anybody can have a great idea, but very few can develop
credible characters, write good dialogue, pace a story effectively for 300
pages, or create a sense of atmosphere with the written word. There’s a name
for those who can. We call them authors.
It’s The Middle That Kills You
As one who
writes mystery novels, I’m here to tell you I have more good ideas than I know
what to do with. Typically, the great idea begins with a concept, followed, in
most cases, with a beginning and ending for a book using that idea. Most of the
time, that’s where the matter ends.
Some
author, I don’t remember who, once said that anyone can come up with a good
beginning and ending for a book, but it’s doing the middle of it that kills
you. That’s where the grunt work of keeping a story going and working out its
details is hardest but most essential. And my experience has been that the more
prepared you are going into it, the easier it goes and the more likely it is to
turn out well.
I marvel at
the people who are turning out a book every couple of months now, to feed the
ever more voracious maw of Amazon. A book a year is the best I can do, and half
that time is spent developing a detailed outline that arranges the details of
the story. To me, that’s more demanding than actually writing it once I know
where the story is going and how it’s going to get there.
Edison Had It Right
The great
inventor Thomas Edison once said that genius is one percent inspiration and 99
percent perspiration. Even for a non-genius like me, writing a book is exactly
like that. Getting the details of plot, character and language right — in other
words, the things that make a good book — is where the rubber meets the road.
A good idea
or concept can get a book noticed or published, but such a book can only go so
far if the rest of it isn’t up to snuff. The graveyard of unpublished and
non-starting self-published books is littered with skeletons. They are all that
remains of good ideas that were insufficiently fleshed out.
