Do I Really Want to Write This?

A lot of words

A novel tends to be at least about 70,000 words long. That’s a lot of typing. Within that space, you could expect to have five or six well-developed central characters (if not more), the main plot, some sort of subplot, and perhaps a second subplot. To put it a different way, that’s quite a lot of words to do with the subject of the book.


The big question

So the question is this: do you really want to write 70,000 words or more about this idea? I don’t think this is asked often enough of writers. The idea that seemed so great to begin with might not have the mileage in it to last a whole novel. Or it might just not interest you as much as you thought it would. You might find that you don’t have the time or the resources to do justice to the concept, especially if a lot of research is involved.

(It's slightly different if you're writing a book to order, but we'll come to that later.)


Letting ideas ferment

My own tactic, if I have a brilliant idea for a novel, is to wait for a month before doing anything with it. By that time, the idea will either have matured (or mutated!) into a story that I’m happy working on properly, or will have faded away. What often happens is that two otherwise weak ideas will end up mixed together to produce a third, much stronger concept.  It might be that a concept which can’t sustain a whole novel becomes part of a different work, or a short story in its own right.

In my own writing, I’ve jettisoned a lot of concepts that sounded exciting at the time, but which didn’t feel so good a month later. I’ve found that there were two settings in particular that I wanted to use to write stories: the tongue in cheek space opera setting of the Space Captain Smith books, and the murky world of the fantasy stories that I’m currently writing, which is a sort of magically-supercharged Renaissance.

Personally, I’m sure that you will never write a great novel on a subject that you don’t really care about. You might write a publishable one, maybe one that will be quite saleable if it’s like something else that sells well, but it won’t last. So you have to really want to do it. And that means having not just a good idea, but all the elements to keep the book engaging to the end. Because if you’re entertained, chances are the reader will be, too.