Is my story idea BIG enough?

Photo by Clever Visuals on Unsplash

Let me be very clear about this. If this is your first book, the most important thing is to find an idea that you can finish.

1.     An idea and characters and world that you can fall in love with, enough to keep you writing every day, for at least15 minutes, for nine months or a year.

2.     An idea that you can test from the beginning to see if there’s enough plot to finish the book: which I recommend you do with Index Cards. Even if you’re a pantser!

3.     You need to find a writing community, online and in person, with experienced writers in it, that you can run your idea by to make sure other people will get excited about it, too.

4.     And you must finish the book.

No dual projects. No chasing after shiny new ideas.

In all the years I’ve been writing and teaching, I have never seen a beginning writer turn into a pro writer by pursuing multiple projects. The chances are abysmal. Suck it up and finish one.

And if this is your first book— never give up something you’re passionate about for commercial considerations. With your first book or script, you are essentially teaching yourself how to write, and the only real requirement is that you love it.

But if you’ve figured out how to write a book, and in fact have written and published a few on some level, or written and optioned or sold some scripts, we have to have a different conversation.

We need to embrace the business side of writing as part of the idea-finding process.

So today I want to address the already-published but maybe not published big enough writer.