Do your mediocre ideas ever become great ones?

Ideas, mediocre or not, are about as valuable as morning fog that evaporates at the first blush of dawn. They don't mean squat until they crystallize into stories, actual STORIES, on paper or in a computer file.

caw

Watched Tango and Cash yesterday. It's a turbo-American, turbo-eighties action adventure by a soviet director trying his hand at turbo-American, turbo-eighties action adventures. In every part of the film you could picture him walking around, fretting, muttering to himself: "No, no, no! I need to make this scene more banal! Perhaps if there are two more car crashes and five more inadequate macho quips... No, simply isn't happening without a stripper..."
Worked out great.

I'm not sure how you would differentiate one from the other until they're actual finished stories and you can set them loose on each other in the ring.

I jot all my ideas down. Even if they seem lame. Some of them get developed further, some of them come in handy for strengthening other projects. A lot of them never see the light of day again.
I don't have epic or mediocre. I have stories that get written and ideas that sit. imho, it's not necessarily the content, but the execution that makes or breaks a story. There aren't new ideas, just new perspectives. You write the best story you can write and the rest is (mostly) out of your control. Just finish what you start and you already have a better shot than the guy pondering which of his projects are worth writing. They're worth writing if you have the passion to finish them.

I am very suspicious about being too quick to label ideas as either good or bad. That way we risk spending a lot of time and energy on ideas which turn out to be pants. And we can be very dismissive of ideas which someone else turns into a gold mine.

But we can use the labels of "good" and "bad" to sift and develop our ideas. Something like this:

Idea generation
In this stage there are no bad ideas. The important thing is to generate as many possible ideas as we can. Be super-optimistic and turn off that nagging voice which is talking about cost and risk. Ideas are usually created by tacking two concepts together (but that's a whole different area).

Idea development and championing
Take each idea in turn and tell yourself that this is the most fabulous idea that anyone has ever had. Your job is to make it work, no matter what it takes. You can turn the volume up a little on the nagging cost/risk voice, but now you are in problem-solving mode. Find a solution to every negative that the black hat comes up with. Ask yourself the open question of power: "how could I make this work?" Don't ask the closed question of "will this work?" because that invites a false yes or no. We might drop a few stone-cold turkeys at this point, but we are really looking to give each idea the best chance it can have.

Judgement
Now we need to balance optimism against caution. Sift the ideas into bad, promising, dubious or whatever categories work for you. Prioritise. Rank them in order. Sometimes we emerge with just one gleaming idea. Sometimes we end up with several, or none. This is the first time we are allowed to talk openly about good vs bad ideas. This is when we need to make choices to filter lots of ideas down to one or two.

Stress-test to destruction
Now we put our black hat firmly on our heads for any remaining options. This is the time to be as cynical as we can be. We need to test the idea to breaking point. A weak idea will wilt at this stage, which is why we have saved this stage til nearly last. If we did this straight away, all of the ideas would probably fail. But by now our last few ideas left standing have a lot of positivity from the idea development stage. There might need to be some iteration between this stage and the preceding two until we can make a decision.

Execute
Now we go away and do it, secure in the knowledge that any idea that has survived this process ought to have something going for it. Solve any problems that come up. Keep testing, keep refining. Have faith in yourself.


The whole thing may sound long-winded but you get faster at it with practice. Honest.

There's this little book, written in 1951, about an unlucky fisherman who catches a big marlin which is then eaten by sharks. He goes home, and in the grand climax, he falls asleep and has a dream.

Boring as hell idea.

It did win the nobel prize though. I think it had something to do with the writing being pretty good.

Let me tell you a story.

I had one idea. It was fantastic. It was a ghost story in a new way, a curse that could only be broken by the one person least suited to breaking it. I wrote it in novel form. It sucked. It sucked so bad that after one gut job, it needs another total scrap-and-redo to even be passable.

I had another idea. It was an okay idea. It was about a god who ate people's souls. I wrote it in short story form. It's one of the better short stories I've written, although I'm still trying to find a market for it.

I had another idea. It was a bad idea. It was a straight-up vampire love story. I wrote it in poem form. The second market I submitted it to accepted it.

There are no bad ideas. There are ideas done well, ideas done badly, and ideas not done at all. The first is what you're aiming for. The second is what you'll produce your first few times out of the gate. The third is the only unacceptable option.

crossword said:

I had to read The Old Man and the Sea for my BA. I suspect today it would struggle to get noticed. At the time it got recognized for the Christian imagery, with the Old Man meant to represent Christ. I remember the bit at the end where he falls into bed with arms outstretched to resemble Christ on the cross.

Honestly, I don’t see it getting any recognition if it were published today. For one thing, today the west is rather more hostile towards Christianity. I'm not trying to bring religion into the discussion. Just saying it's different times now.

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I don't remember anything Christian about the story, so I think it would still be appreciated. Enjoyment comes from empathizing with the character, not from spotting the symbolism, and that was a potent, relatable story of struggle.

I think if it didn't get appreciated today, that'd be because Hemingway's spare, effective prose has influenced the way people write to such an extent that he wouldn't stand out from the pack anymore.

GraemeTollins said:

There's this little book, written in 1951, about an unlucky fisherman who catches a big marlin which is then eaten by sharks. He goes home, and in the grand climax, he falls asleep and has a dream.

Boring as hell idea.

It did win the nobel prize though. I think it had something to do with the writing being pretty good.

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No, it didn't. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. The Nobel in Literature is awarded for a body of work, not a single individual work.

As far as it getting noticed or not, Hemingway was a major established writer with a long, important and popular track record by the time OMS was written. As I recall, it was written specifically for a major periodical (Saturday Evening Post, I think) by request of the editor. In any case, it was far from being a manuscript by an unknown writer.

caw

blacbird said:

No, it didn't. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. The Nobel in Literature is awarded for a body of work, not a single individual work.

As far as it getting noticed or not, Hemingway was a major established writer with a long, important and popular track record by the time OMS was written. As I recall, it was written specifically for a major periodical (Saturday Evening Post, I think) by request of the editor. In any case, it was far from being a manuscript by an unknown writer.

caw

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Correct that the Nobel prize is awarded to the author and not the work, although the committee did state that the Old Man and the Sea was a major contributing factor to Hemingway getting the prize. However, I should have said Pulitzer Prize.
My point was obviously the fact that it was the execution of the story, and not its plot, that made it such a great book, in line with the theme of the thread.