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.
