What To Do When The Idea is Cool but the Book Sucks?

You see the new plot to a book. It sounds like the coolest idea ever. You decide before you go spend twenty dollars, you should go to the most honest book review site ever: Goodreads. You are surprised to see that everyone says the book is awful and not worth your time. This begs a lot of questions. I find this is true most with YA novels. The idea is incredibly cool but the actual book doesn’t know how to handle it. This is a problem a lot of writers have. The idea is so cool, and I think most writers get really excited when they come up with the coolest idea since Harry Potter, but then have to stretch it to two hundred plus pages, it becomes a real drag. The writer doesn’t know how to execute it. There’s a lot of skill that goes into the coolest idea for a book ever. There’s world building and there’s backstory and there’s characters that still need to be great. It needs humanistic characters the reader connects to despite this being the coolest idea you ever had.

Sometimes I love an idea for a book that already exists so much I just want to re-write it. I can already criticize and come up with all the cool places that this idea could of went. However, it’s really not that simple. The poor author who is getting savaged on their Amazon page and Goodreads is already feeling the pain of their cool idea not really working. Now, I’m not saying it’s entirely not their fault. Of course it is. Some ideas really work better as short stories and are not meant to be stretched into a whole book. Sometimes you read a book that is clearly meant to be a series and the second book never comes out at all. I won’t mention any first books here, but I think you can guess them.

This is very true in YA, as there are two types of YA writers. The YA writer who really is passionate about writing for young people and the YA writer who just wants to share in the millions of dollars a YA series can bring them. The first kind of YA writer is the best at stretching an idea because they care about their characters, young people, as more than just wizards, clones, robots, vampires, zombies or whatnot. They care about them as young people first and foremost. The other kind of YA writer just thinks a cool idea is enough to make them a cool writer. They don’t think deeper than kids with magical powers is cool.

            

However, this happens in adult books too. Like the character, Richard Stark, in Stephen King’s “The Dark Half”, a literary writer writes a series of books under a pen name about a serial killer who is really good at what he does. Those books sell a ton of copies. Also note “Misery”, as Paul Sheldon is a similar character. He writes cheesy romance novels, which makes him millions, while putting off his literary works. This illustrates a problem with a lot of books (and lets be honest, screenplays too). The shiny idea is so freaking cool, you get excited over it but than once you try to stretch it to a full work, you find it falls apart.

I’ve had my share of really cool ideas. I’ve tried to stretch them. J.K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyers, Suzanne Collins and Rich Riordan are masters at stretching out a cool idea. Yet many really good YA writers have tried to stretch out a lot of their ideas outside of their comfort zone and see it fall apart. You can’t write a cool idea without having good characters readers can connect to, to lead them through their story. What I mean by this is the character is equally important to the idea around them. There is a term for the cool idea, more precisely. It’s called “high concept,” and that means it’s an idea that’s not realistic but you are going to give it your all.

Harry Potter is high concept, for example. It’s not the boarding school from a John Irving novel. It’s the boarding school with magic, but she was smart in not making her characters too high concept. Despite the magical setting, the actual characters are really kids, for the most part. However, the high concept trend is starting to go out of fashion. John Green writes about kids in realistic situations, and basically, it’s a cycle. High concept trends but realism often stays.

So, what do you do when the idea is cool but the book sucks? Well, it’s really tempting to want to re-write the idea in your own fashion and try to make it better. I am tempted to nitpick all the time. I want to take that cool idea and totally change it up to make it better. However, even if the book sucks, you have to give the writer credit for trying to make something work that’s totally interesting in the first place. If you are passionate about your creation and the world you built, go for it. We all need escapes into something we don’t see everyday.

Some Thoughts on Genre

When I look at the fiction I write, I really have to say it’s clearly magical realism. I don’t have the intense enough attention to detail for fantasy, and I get bored with the purity of it when I write. However, I do love to read other people’s fantasy. The question becomes what genre should one write? I love science fiction, but I don’t know a lot about science. The best science fiction, to me, has some element of science in it. A lot of good science fiction has really no elements of science in it, but the best has some element of science. I love the idea of magic happening in the real world but the reaction being mundane at best. Some say that magical realism is a fancy way of just saying you write fantasy, however I don’t think that’s true. Fantasy has more of an element of surprise, and I think the success of books like “Harry Potter” work because of that combination of fantasy and magical realism. In my stories, things happen, that are magical, that are unbelievable, yet everyone’s reaction seems to be that they are ordinary. A lot of the best Twilight Zone episodes are magical realism, because of the way the people react to these weird situations like they are no big deal. Of course, genre goes hand in hand in a lot of other areas. Genre goes hand in hand with audience. “Fifty Shades Of Grey” is erotica and obviously isn’t being written for teenagers. However, “Fifty Shades of Grey” started out as a fan fiction of “Twilight”, which some has classified as erotic in nature but obviously Edward Cullen isn’t going to do the things to Bella Swan that they do in the books of “Fifty Shades of Grey”.

I think to pick a genre, you have to look at the kind of story you have. Genre is very important to the success or failure of a book. Sometimes it works when a book doesn’t have a genre, but mixes them up into something new. Sometimes a solid genre really helps a book connect with an audience. It’s obvious that Stephanie Meyer pioneered paranormal romance in popularity and it connects with young female readers. It’s also obvious that J.K. Rowling pioneered the popularity of young adult fantasy and it connected with all sorts of people as an escape. I write in multiple genres, but my last few stories have all been magical realism. In some current stories I have written, things that are fantastical have happened, but what I like about the genre is the reaction to it. In the universe created in a magical realism story, the idea that something unusual is happening isn’t treated as a big deal as it might be in a fantasy novel. Magic just seems like a part of everyday life.

Dystopia has become a big deal in publishing lately, and it’s not all that new of a genre. Suzanne Collins “The Hunger Games” has taken off and created a whole new interest in dystopia. The problem with a lot of authors and genre is they often find a niche in a genre. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it helps the author put out a lot more content. However, sometimes that can get an author stuck in one type of story. Stephen King has been criticized as recycling by some critics. Dean Koontz has been praised for being able to bend genre, often mixing more than one genre into one book.

However, sometimes an author shouldn’t leave their genre as much as they want to. I tried to read J.K. Rowling’s first adult novel, “The Casual Vacancy,” and I admire her for trying something new. However, the problem with the novel wasn’t that she was trying something new. It was that she threw out what made her novels so successful in the first place. The quirkiness of her style was gone. Instead, it was mostly unlikeable characters trying to deal with depressing thoughts. Sometimes an author shouldn’t go too far from their genre or style, up to the point they are unrecognizable to the reader. However, that’s what pen names are for.

My favorite genres of books are young adult, middle grade, magical realism, horror, non fiction, science fiction, cyberpunk, coming of age, romantic comedy, dystopia and good old stories about people simply being people. I find that magical elements are fun to write about but also combining it with stories about people who are mundane is also an appealing aspect to my fiction writing. The question becomes how does one pick a genre? My advice to pick a genre you feel comfortable in for one’s first outing as a fiction writer.

Also, let me say if you want to write in a genre, also read that genre. Don’t read a ton of horror novels and than turn around and try to write a romance. That wouldn’t make sense. Often this can be hard for an uneven reader, such as myself, because we can’t stick to one kind of book and read a lot of genres, creating a reading list that is all over the place. That’s why often the best fiction writers are very into one kind of genre. If you read a lot of fantasy, and have some kind of writing ability, you might be able to write in that genre. However, that’s why sub genres as they are called are good, because they are under the umbrella of a bigger genre. Magical realism is under the umbrella of fantasy, and thus you can borrow elements of fantasy and use it in a more common story without it overpowering it. So, pick wisely.

Things to remember when picking a genre for your story

-Your audience

-What lends itself to a single book or a series?

-The type of situation you are writing about?

-What type of things should happen in the genre? (For example, you aren’t going to have a sex scene in the middle of a young adult fantasy novel).

-The age of your characters and what kind of situation they are in? (Kids on a magical quest are a different genre than a couple of adults trying to figure out who was the one who murdered another person!)

-And your premise, which really applies to both audience and genre, as some premises do not really lend themselves to an adult book and some do not to a kids book.