Ideas Are Cheap

Next to the advice "write what you know," I think the most common writing advice ever given is the small tidbit that "ideas are cheap." If you listen to writers talk, they'll tell you. Ideas are cheap. It's the skill and talent required to write that's hard to come by. They hand out this fact like parents hand out candy on Halloween, and over the last few years, I've come to accept this morsel of truth as hard fact. I've been blessed with enough quirky ideas to know that they're easy enough to come by if you know what you're looking for.

This past weekends was one of those very moments, where suddenly an idea made sense. The very basics of the idea had occurred to me years ago after seeing a production of Robin Hood at a high school, but at the time, I didn't have enough of a sense of, I don't know, life in order to piece the idea together into a story, or even a premise. But when the idea came to me again late Saturday night and again Sunday morning (during sacrament meeting), it was like someone lit a fire underneath me (if I may be so cliche).

Ideas that didn't work three years ago suddenly did. Characters looked more fleshed out, more original. The basic premise became more plausible. The conflict became . . . more conflicting.

And I really don't think I can communicate to you the rush I feel with this new idea bouncing around in my head. It's still not very fleshed out. There are still a lot of things I need to figure out and a lot of things that need to be tweaked and twisted until they all fit together. But I'm excited and I want to get going.

Here's the hang up of cheap ideas, though. New ideas are inherently more intriguing than old ones. So while my mind wants to race off with this new material, this new toy, this new playground, my creative writing class is still waiting for me on the old playground. I have a partially finished manuscript (I estimate that, at 50,000 words, I'm about a third of the way through), and I want to finish it, I really do, but this new shiny idea is way too intriguing.

And add that to the fact that I have a monster assignment due tonight, a paper due on Thursday, a test on Friday, another test the following Wednesday, another test the following Tuesday and three major papers looming in the distance and you might be able to understand why the concept of cheap ideas is so troubling.