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New Ideas

Thursday, March 25, 2010

...where do the good ideas come from?...

H

ere's a quote from someone's Facebook wall,

Just when I think of a great script idea...I search and find out it is already 'in production' for 2012!

I know the feeling. I once started work on a story only to plop a DVD into the player and discover the story I started, the great idea I molded, was already a movie and before that a successful novel in hardcover. Ugh!

There was no point continuing with the same idea because it had been done--even though I had thought it up on my own--it didn't matter. I had to move onto another premise, another idea.

After I soaked in enough frustration from being deflated, I felt better when I realized I had come up with a clever idea for a story and others thought enough it to publish a book and make a feature film. That was something. Much better than no ideas or tired ones.

But any idea, clever or derivative, is nothing until it is formed into its being as a novel, script, prototype, beta version, or business plan in action. There are lots of ideas, what matters is the execution of it. Many people fail to understand this later part.

Darwin didn't come up with the notion of evolution, others had the idea. What Darwin did was develop the mechanism to explain how it happened, natural selection, and spent decades compiling the evidence to support his theory. (It's a theory that stands to this day. After 150 years, mountains of research and evidence support Darwin's work. Remarkable.)

So for our frustrated blogger on Facebook, keep at it, there will be many more ideas and some of them will make it into your next story or the one after that. Speaking of which, I have a novel to write. It's about a doctor possessed with the notion of creating life out of...

Posted 2010/03/25 at 19h30ET in Writing.

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