A top reason fiction gets rejected is for lack of original premise.
Take it from Rebecca E Treasure, Managing Editor at “Apex Magazine.” She’s in charge of the magazine’s monthly flash fiction contest. She says one of the top comments she sees from Apex’s slush pile readers is, “This was well written. But it didn’t do anything new.” Anyone who’s taken one of Rebecca’s workshops here at Reach Your Apex knows she spends a generous amount of time driving home this fact and helping writers overcome it. It’s that important.
A fresh premise gets you a long way with publishers. So it’s worth investing your time developing a system to reliably generate new ideas. Imagine if every time you sat down to write, you could be confident you’d find a unique take on your story.
Sounds great. If it were easy, though, I wouldn’t be writing this post. Maybe you’ve felt the sting of having a piece rejected for lack of originality, despite believing you’d created something really new. How does this happen?
Blame your subconscious.
“I wasn’t consciously aware of the similarity to ‘He’s So Fine,’” former Beatle George Harrison reflected in his biography, I Me Mine. In 1981 Harrison had been ordered by a court to pay $587,000 for plagiarizing The Chiffons‘ 1963 hit music single, ‘He’s So Fine‘ in his own solo release, ‘My Sweet Lord.’ If you haven’t done so, it’s enlightening to listen to each of them (I’ve linked the song titles to recordings on YouTube).
“I wasn’t consciously aware of the similarity to ‘He’s So Fine’”
Now, George Harrison was no hack. Frank Sinatra called Harrison’s ‘Something’ “…the greatest love song of the past 50 years.” Yet even George fell victim to his own subconscious. “He’s So Fine” snuck its way into his creative process, masquerading as something new.
If Harrison was vulnerable to his subconscious back then, so are we all today. I mean, George didn’t even have a smart phone in the 1970’s. Everyone reading this post has already been exposed to exponentially more content than George was during his entire lifetime.
There are countless story ideas, great one-liners, and opening scenes from everything you’ve ever seen or heard. They’re lurking in your grey matter just waiting to make their entrance onto the stage of your writing dressed up as original ideas.
All right, it’s the subconscious’ fault. But, really. At this point in civilization, is there any such thing as an original idea?
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut didn’t think so. Most authors are familiar with Vonnegut’s five basic types of story structures: Man in Hole, Boy Meets Girl, Cinderella, From Bad to Worse, and Good News/Bad News. He claimed all stories fell into one of those structures. Then there’s that thing Tolstoy supposedly said: “All great literature is one of two stories—a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” (Let’s just overlook the cis male centric-NESS of all that in order to stay on topic.)
Sure enough, we can probably wedge most stories we’ve seen into one of these constructs. So maybe there really aren’t any original ideas. If so, why are you expected to come up with one every time you write?
Rebecca Treasure has more to offer us here: “Originality is impossible, but individuality is not.” Your worldview is your treasure trove. The trick is to find a way to access it and what’s different about it.
“Originality is impossible, but individuality is not.”
“I had a job I didn’t like, and I was walking into work one day and just found myself being like, ‘God I wish I could just jump ahead, and suddenly it was 5pm and I could have done the work but not have to experience it!’” That’s how Dan Erickson describes the way he came up with his concept for his hit streaming TV series, “Severance.”
[Tiny spoiler alert here. I’m about to reveal the premise of “Severance.”] “Severance” is about a modern office workforce who are essentially slaves. The twist? They’ve enslaved themselves, willingly, by undergoing a procedure that severs their work memories from their non-work memories. Severed workers have no rights and no idea who they are outside of work. One day they’ve just “woken up” at work as brand new people.
We’ve seen plenty of sci-fi stories about enslaved workforces. Erickson took a weird thought that popped into his head one day at work, in his real life, and ran with it to turn the sci-fi enslaved workforce story into something new. How many of us have had a similar thought about our jobs as Erickson did that day at his job at the door factory? We can relate.
Of course, decades earlier, Meryl Streep uttered the great line, “Do I have to be there for it?” in the film, “Postcards From The Edge” after an ER doctor told her character that he was about to pump her stomach. Not being there for something you’re forced to experience isn’t a new idea. But the ability to engineer your own not-being-at-your-soul-sucking-job, while still doing that job, is.
Accessing your unique worldview is how you stand out in the slush pile. How you do that in a repeatable fashion depends upon what works for you. A good rule of thumb is that your first few ideas are rarely your most unique ones. Exercises, methods and systems that force you beyond your first inclinations are your friend.
Look for tools that help you free associate and dig into your buried feelings and beliefs. Free writing and automatic writing are classic methods. Consistent journaling is another. Many authors get great ideas from local news (truth is definitely stranger than fiction). Some creatives find that taking long solo walks are essential. Hell, I know people who swear by playing Mad Libs. Whatever works.
“There’s a domestic situation where there’s a man who’s on the edge of paranoia, and as his paranoia increases a monster takes shape in a Scottish lake, the monster being a symbol of the man’s anxiety. That’s a synchronistic situation.” That was Sting, lead singer and lyricist of post-punk music group, The Police, in the documentary film, “The Police: A Visual Documentary” talking about their recently released track, “Synchronicity II.”
“Synchronicity II” was a huge hit in 1983.
The song captures a day in the life of a man living in a suburban dystopia—not a terribly original premise. But, linking that man’s anxiety to the synchronous event of the Loch Ness Monster deciding today’s the day it’s going to reveal itself to the world? That’s an original combination. What do these two things have to do with each other? Perhaps a lot when Nessy at last casts its “shadow on the door of a cottage on the shore of a dark Scottish lake…” We don’t know what creative process Sting used in order to associate these two things. But the results hold up to this very day.
“So you see, imagination needs noodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”
– Brenda Ueland, from her book, “If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit”
Whatever the method, you need to make lots of space for your creativity. Indulge in it. Creativity is possibly the only place where self-care equals productivity. Take advantage of all the ways artists before you have accessed their inner uniqueness. And rest assured that unlimited unique ideas lie within you. They’re just shy and a little anti-authoritarian, like some of your favorite fictional characters.
