Authorial Musings: Ideas Are Not Valuable

 

One of the most pernicious – and ultimately damaging – myths that newbie or would-be authors often buy into (and I do not exclude myself from this!) is that "my ideas are valuable!" Specifically, they think their ideas are so valuable that they must HIDE those ideas to keep other authors or publishers from stealing them.

In almost all circumstances, this is utterly untrue. Believing this myth severely constrains a prospective author (or other artist) because they look at other authors and editors as, at best, competitors, and at worst as potential enemies. They try to hide the best elements of their work, sometimes going so far as to insist that they should have a contract before they reveal the awesome plot twist or other idea that they believe is the key to their future success.

In truth? Most other authors are your potential allies. Make friends with other authors, they're likely to give you a leg up when you need it, talk up your stuff, maybe even help you in more material ways. The fact that I have a career at all is directly due to the fact that a fellow, and far more experienced and better placed, author – Eric Flint – took the time and energy to read my work and, having decided it was pretty good, put it in front of Jim Baen, his publisher. My self-published work Polychrome would have probably turned out a lot less impressive and professional without the help of another pro – Lawrence Watt-Evans – who had the experience and knowledge, and willingness, to assist me.

Editors and publishers may not be, strictly speaking, your allies, but they are the people you want to like you and your work. They're the people you want to impress. Holding back the most awesome and neato ideas and "elevator pitches" is shooting your potential career in the foot – and worse, if they get the idea that you are doing that, you've made an automatically bad impression by implying that they could be thieves.

HAS it ever happened that another author, or publisher, has stolen someone's work, published it as their own? Yes, of course it has. But it's rare. Unless you spend your life deathly afraid of being struck by lightning, you shouldn't be concerned about having your stuff stolen that way, because it's more likely – considering the number of stories submitted to publishers over the years and the number of actual thefts – that you'll be struck by lightning than be victim of theft of your story.

The latter phrase is important: theft of your story. Note that I did not say "theft of your ideas". Ideas are not copyrightable except in very limited cases. Another common result of the unfortunate "I must protect my ideas!" mindset is that the would-be or newbie author sees something similar to a story they submitted somewhere come out, and conclude "OMG, they stole my ideas!!"

No. Almost certainly no, they did not. Because – here's the thing – ideas are almost worthless. One of the most common painful things encountered by almost all established author is the earnest wannabe who comes up to the established author with a pitch that amounts to "I have this awesome idea! I tell you the idea, you write the book, we split the fortune 50/50!"

It's really hard to tell the earnest fan – especially without mortally offending them – that (A) their idea is probably not even vaguely as awesomely original as they think, and that (B) it's not the idea that makes the money, it's the solidification of the idea into a particular expression – the story – that takes the effort AND makes the money. The idea is just the start.

(A) is why, alas, I could not sue the various people like White Wolf and Buffy and other Urban Fantasy people for stealing my idea of the modern-day vampire/werewolf hunting hero, even though I invented Jason Wood and Verne Domingo and his people long before White Wolf was born and a decade and more before Buffy entered Sunnydale. On the positive side, it's also why Joss Whedon, Jim Butcher, and the producers of Underworld couldn't harass me.

In summary, point (A) is "It has ALL been done before. Probably before you would believe it was ever done." For example, the "awesome concept" of "The Matrix" was "the world you know is really just a projection from a machine". Not only was that also done at about the same time (better, in my view) by The Thirteenth Floor, but you could trace the idea itself back to The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster in 1909, and in general concept all the way back to Plato's Cave (ancient Greece).

I had to accept that – in all likelihood – I would never have an "original" idea, in the sense of "wow, I've never heard of anything like that before". This is true of virtually all authors. I think I've encountered maybe two or three new ideas in my entire life, none of them mine.

We all build on those that came before us (one reason that the current stagnation of the public domain is a serious problem for writers), and what matters isn't the core idea; it's how we take that idea and connect it with this idea and then express it through these approaches to create our stories.

This is where point (B) really comes in. Ideas by themselves are WORTHLESS to an author. Not, obviously, because we don't have to get ideas for our stories, but because we already have waaaaayyyy too many of them. I don't need your ideas, I need time to write mine. Oh, there are exceptions – an author may have an idea that they can't actually write by themselves, and need someone else to write part of it (that's how I came to write Boundary and sequels with Eric) – but for the most part, authors literally are overflowing with ideas. I have enough ideas to support probably a dozen new series, let alone additional single works, just sitting on my hard drive in one file. That's without trying. They just pop into my head and I work at them for a bit and write them down, then get back to the paying work.

The other reason ideas themselves are worthless is that the interpretation of the idea changes almost limitlessly with different authors. There were editors that would demonstrate this directly: they would send three separate authors an identical prompt – a capsule story description, a painting, a quote – and then publish the three resulting stories. Rarely could a reader even notice that there was a commonality between them.

Seriously; if I had even told another author the key points of Grand Central Arena, with a lot more detail than just the most basic, the likelihood is that they would still have written a novel that had at best only a superficial resemblance to mine.

Thus, almost all of the cases of "that looks like my idea" are pure coincidence. As humans we're really good at seeing patterns, even when the patterns are just in random noise. As the various tropes used in fiction (and especially in specific areas of genre fiction) are pretty well defined, it's very easy to see a given pattern in a lot of works. Often, very similar works will show up almost at the same time – without there being any connection between them.

This happened with Arthur C. Clarke and Charles Sheffield – both of them published novels on the design and construction of the world's first space elevator or "beanstalk", with some rather surprising parallels – the main character was named Merlin in one and Morgan in the other, both main characters were the designers of the longest bridges in the world, both approached to tackle the ambitious project of constructing the space elevator, and both books featured a key device called "Spider". Yet neither author was aware of the other's work when they began their writing. Sometimes, it's just an idea's time and everyone starts writing books with that idea.

So – in conclusion – value your stories. Value what you put into it – the plot, the characters, the setting, the gestalt that makes it not an idea but a tale worth telling. Don't be afraid to tell it to the people who could help you. We don't want to steal your ideas. Really. We've got plenty of our own. But if your tales are worth reading, we just might be able to help you share them.