On picking the best ideas

[Kessie]

I just posted this in the Lost Genre yahoo group, and I thought it might be fun to throw out here, too.

I was browsing around the Literary Rambles blog, and I happened across this blogpost:

www.literaryrambles.com/2012/08/tuesday-tip-140-and-giveaway-demonkeeper.\
html

" So many writers I meet are so determined to write that one story that they
love that they'll forgo all others, whether or not anyone else loves it. And,
importantly, whether or not it can sell.
Here's my advice for avoiding spending a year of your life writing something you
think is great, but no one else will.

Try writing a "one-page" for 5-10 different stories. Then try them on people.
Everyone will tell you that a single story idea is "good." But it might be more
valuable to have each of those people tell you which story is the _best_."



I've never thought of doing this before. I do have a lot of ideas, and I don't know which of them might be more palatable to a wide audience. I have a bunch of people watching me on deviantart, and I'm thinking of polling them, since they're the YA age slice.

Kessie

[newburydave]

Kessie;

Strikes me as a useful idea. Try bouncing it off the Sandbox crowd.

IMHO it might be a useful exercise for the Boxers to try out on each other. We could put our onepagers in a special file in our Folders and maybe set up some kind of voting sheet with the onepagers.

Interested

SGD
dave

[Kessie]

I ran several ideas through a poll on deviantart, and I was surprised at which one floated to the top. (My current WIP is number 2! Yay!) But the one with the most votes will definitely be my next project. The winning one is,

"A failed assassin goes on the run with the bounty hunter hired to find her across the floating continents of a shattered planet, fleeing the mastermind who hired them both."

While this one is number 2: "A guy inherits a truckload of magic and does everything wrong with it, landing him on the wrong side of both the law and the dark angel poised to escape her prison dimension."

[beckyminor]

This touches on my worst fear--that I will have sunk a boatload of time into something nobody likes. (For instance, a certain novel it's taken 5 years to get from first word to print. Heaven forbid it gets out there and the world rolls it's eyes at it!)

But the idea of pitching the boiled down version to people seems valuable on many levels. If a story has a powerful premise, we should be able express that succinctly, right?

[Kessie]

Becky: Oh, Curse-Bearer is firmly fantasy, if not high fantasy because of the multiple races and immense world scope. I know lots of people who will eat it up. Plus you're a good storyteller.

I also admit to being smitten with Culduin. :-D

[j2starshine]

That sounds like a cool idea. What is a "one pager"? a synopsis or the first page of the book?

[Kessie]

J2: A synopsis, because if you just go around handing out first book pages, that's the hook they're judging, not the whole story.

[Kristen]

Becky, I agree with Kessie. Curse-Bearer rocks. Fear not.

[Kristen]

And Kessie, I gotta go with your beta testers. The assassin story sounds a little more compelling.

[Kessie]

Kristen: Thanks! I can't wait to get back to it because it's full of all the emotional resonance I just love. The bounty hunter is emotionally shut down because his fiance was murdered a year prior, and this adventure helps him work through the grieving process. Poor guy. Not to mention the assassin gets to live a somewhat human life and rediscovers those tricky things called 'emotions'.

[Kristen]

Cool. The truckload of magic blurb might go over better if you could get the hero's goal in there. With the assassin/bounty hunter story, we know they want toescape from the mastermind. But what does the truck guy want?

[Kristen]

Also, "a guy" isn't as interesting as "assassin" or "bounty hunter." Is there a better label for him?

[Kessie]

Well, I really don't want to say "the chosen one" or "random dude gets magic powers and becomes The One", both of which are accurate. I guess I could say "a street racer adrenaline junky suddenly discovers he has magic, what's more, a sort of magic that makes him a walking target."

Should I mention the "saving the world" bit? Or just leave it at "getting on the wrong side of the dark angelus yadda yadda?" Since everybody wants to destroy the world. It's standard for villains.

[Kristen]

Yeah, street racer adrenaline junky totally works!

[Bethany J.]

This is a great idea! I've been working on the same trilogy for 7 years now, with several transitory side projects. I'd be curious to know if any of the side projects and ideas sound more interesting to people than my "magnum opus", which I've poured so much work into throughout the years. Even if it never sold, though, I wouldn't call that time "wasted"; at the very least I've sharpened my skills through my constant revisions, and I *know* there have been friends and family members who've enjoyed the story and fallen in love with the characters. That in itself is worth all the effort!

P.S. Kessie, your assassin/bounty hunter hook sounds very intriguing! Usually when I see an assassin as the protagonist my eyes glaze over and I lose interest, but I'm really intrigued.