PSA: Ideas are Easy

[rolanni]

We love that our fans write to us; it’s good to know that folks find our characters and our stories compelling and worthwhile. We really do appreciate your care.

But there’s a Thing. We say it from time to time. We haven’t said it for a little while, and a note that came in yesterday reminded me of this.

So!

Please don’t send us story ideas. We have story ideas — lots of them. The problem, as I see it, is not that we’re going to run out of ideas, but that we’re going to run out of time before we’re able to flesh out all the ideas we have into stories.

Ideas are the easy part of the writing process. (But don’t just take my word for it — here’s another writer on the same topic). Execution, that’s where the time and the craft comes in.

Now, you may say, But! How do I know that you guys have thought of my story unless I tell you?

And the answer is — we may not have done. But, yanno? We might have. And if you send us a story idea, and it happens to be an idea for a story under consideration for Splinter Universe? We get to feeling a little weird about going forward, because other authors have unfortunately experienced Time-Consuming and Story-Swallowing Unpleasantnesses because a reader identified one of the author’s stories as having “used” (in at least one case the word used by the offended reader was “stolen”) the reader’s idea, and now they want a piece of the action.

So, it’s just easier for everyone if you don’t send us story ideas. It’s OK to wonder what happened to your favorite characters, or where a plot line might go, but — we have plenty of ideas, really. And we’d like to write as many of them down as we possibly can.

Thanks for listening.

Here ends the PSA.

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

Fan Fiction

[claire774.livejournal.com]

I found it! Time July 7, 2011: Lev Grossman "Harry Potter the Boy Who Lived Forever." time.com. Fascinating story about Fan Fiction. Apparently lots of people write Harry Potter stories. The thing is does J.K. Rowling let them publish those or do they just pass them around to their friends? Or what?

C.