Writing talent is all well and good. It takes a lot to develop consistently good, if not great writing ability. Those first drafts always tend to turn out very jagged around the edges indeed. But let’s say we’ve got the writing part down pat. Aside from my belief that the moment one believes they’ve reached the culmination of their writing ability and don’t have any way they could get better…that this is when their writing will suffer…aside from this, just assume that we’ve somehow gotten to the point where everything we write could be considered publishable.
Is this going to be enough? Agent Kristin Nelson doesn’t seem to think so.
When strong writing isn’t enough
What is this post saying? Nelson is saying that even for the strongest, most capable of writers, there are many more elements that go into the mix of getting published than simply one’s skill at placing prose. You must consider, first of all, whether the story you’re writing is in fact original enough to stand out. If five other novels have gone to market along with yours, and they’re all basically the same story, then they are all going to suffer. This is why people like editors and agents watch the market and know what’s swimming under the surface. The novel you’ve constructed may feel entirely original and fresh, but human minds tend to follow sometimes disturbingly familiar paths and there is always the possibility (no…I guarantee you that someone has thought about it before) that the same idea has occurred to someone else. Most of the time, you have the advantage because you’ve actually gone on and squeezed the idea out of your brain, letting the drops stain the page. Still, you can’t stop someone from writing a similar story, especially if it’s in a common subgenre…vampires, werewolves, heroic quests, etc.
Agent Nelson’s solution, or more preventative measure is to be a consistent reader. Know what’s out there so you don’t end up repeating someone else’s already published work to the chapter breaks. I would also add that you can do a lot of research to this end as well. You can check amazon for plots and keywords, seeing if there are books that mirror what you’ve been drafting and outlining. If so…well, you have a couple options. You can push on, believing that your writing is strong enough to overcome the similar plot points and make yours stand out to readers. You can stop writing it and work on something else. Or you can take what you have and twist and turn it into something entirely different. The last is the biggest challenge, I’d say, since it forces you to move beyond limits you didn’t even know were there when you began.
Should we go into the writing venture afraid that everything we jot down is going to be paralleled somewhere else in our world, and so whatever project we finish will end up butting heads with some other genre brainchild? Certainly not. But it helps to keep our eyes open and never pretend that we’re the only creative people on the planet. Fortunately we get to share this experience, and knowing this, we should take our growing writing strengths and push ourselves to even further reaches of originality. If we don’t want to follow in another’s footsteps, then we need to forge our own paths.
I see that smile.