Ideas that seem much too ambitious for beginners

Ideas are cheap. Very cheap. An idea is never what makes or breaks a good read, it's all about how it's executed/written. You can write a 500 page story on a person's first day at his/her new job, and you can write a 100 page story that spans millenia of your fantasy world.

It is definitely not always the case that a more intricate core idea of a story equals a greater chance of your story being good in the end. That being said, you may want to be more familiar with yourself and your writing skills before trying to run too many interwoven plotlines at once. Trying to keep 20 thin red lines running and tied together can be tricky.


As a last reference to encourage you to keep your ideas simple--the picture below show some sketches of a cow by Picasso. They are in correct chronological order. He, as many other artists of various fields, came to understand the importance of learning to comprehend and master the very simplest of ideas. He didn't fully understand the cow once he had learned to draw one lifelike. He understood it only after he learned the essence of the cow and how he could represent one with as few lines as possible. Take this with you when you ponder your ideas. Simplify your ideas, learn to differentiate your ideas from secondary plots/what-have-you, and dissect that simple idea until you fully understand it, and then write.

 

OMG! Are you me? Have I been cloned in my sleep?? This is precisely what I always struggle with!

For myself, I'm drawn to grand, metaphysical, world shaking ideas. But I doubt my ability to do them any justice. So I try to come up with more manageable ideas that I can use to gain skill as a writer. Yet, the smaller ideas don't ever excite me. I can't manage to put my heart into them. And if I can't manage to find them very interesting, how could readers?

Actually, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Especially after reading an article about author William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson wrote only 4 novels and it has commonly been believed that he wrote them in the order they were published. The Boats of the Glen Clarrig in 1907, The Ghost Pirates in 1909, The House on the Borderland in 1908 and The Night Land in 1912. Now if you look at the books in this order it appears that Hodgson started out writing basically an adventure/survival story with horror elements but nothing that requires a supernatural explanation. The prose is somewhat archaic (something Hodgson apparently had a serious thing for) and flat, but readable. Going on through The Ghost Pirates and House on the Borderland he begins moving from adventure/horror toward sci fi and cosmic horror. The prose becomes increasingly more stilted by archaism with each novel. And last, comes The Night Land which is a truly epic far future fantasy with strong cosmic horror elements. I would call it easily the most imaginative book I have ever read, but it is fatally flawed by employing a nearly unreadable pseudo-seventeenth century style of prose which, combined with a massive 200,000 word count, makes reading the book nearly unbearable. So Hodgson was seen as starting out more mundane and approachable and then going a bit crazy with highly original but obsessively badly written stories.

Ok, but recent evidence suggests that he actually wrote the books in reverse of the publishing order. He wrote the Night Land, which was meant to be his great masterpiece, first, throwing all of himself and his tastes into it. But it received hundreds of rejections, and no wonder. So he tried again. Still not good enough for publication. And again, getting better. And finally, he had forced himself to write as plainly as he could for the 4th attempt and finally was accepted. He must have really wanted to get the others published as well because there are no records of him starting any more novels at any time after these were written. Then came the war and Hodgson was killed in 1918 while serving. The Night Land was his last published novel and for all its flaws it is still his most remembered work because it is his most ambitious and imaginative work. We'll never know what else he might have followed it up with.

When I think of all that, I begin to think that perhaps throwing myself into the crazy ambitious project right away is ultimately the better idea.

 

You. Don't. Get. Good. At. Writing. Without. Writing. Things. Out. Of. Your. Comfort. Zone.

Writing the idea you don't feel like you're ready for is how you GET the experience and skill you need to do it justice. Staying with ideas that feel tame and easy enough to not scare you is how you DON'T grow. It's how you stagnate.

Write *that* book. Write the book that is in you, deep in you, but the one that scares you the most, the one that feels too big for you. Write the book that is aching in your bones to be written. Listen to it and trust it.

It'll take many many drafts and lots and lots of time. And you might have to take breaks from it just to keep yourself from frying your brain. But WRITE THE BOOK. *THAT* book. The one you're scared of, the one you're humble enough to realize you're not ready to tackle and yet not quite confident enough to try anyway.

Do it. Don't settle.
Good luck.

 

A bit off topic, but I do not believe this is true. It might accurately describe some writers. There are people who only grow through challenge and adversity. But there are also many people who don't. There are many, many ways to learn and grow because people are so unique. If you've found that you need to push yourself outside your comfort zone and that works for you, that's great. But please don't assume everyone is like you or that your method is required for writing in general.

 

Yeah. That's definitely a problem I have too.
I think sometimes it is a good idea to do something simpler to start off with, but I also don't think that just because something is simple, it isn't pushing you.
I'm a newer writer. I would love to go out and write a brilliant novel that perfectly explores one of those brilliant ideas that I'm super passionate about, but at this point I'm happy if I manage to finish a coherent novella. I wouldn't abandon the big ideas just because you don't think you're ready to write them though. You can always use just a piece of it in a smaller story in order to keep you excited about it.
But you don't have to do that, either. Sometimes the story just is complicated, and you just have to write it that way. It's helpful to keep in mind though that there are ways to make a story more manageable besides just making it shorter. I think the most important thing is to keep practicing. Eventually, your skills will get thete.

 

That's kind of my point. A story with less elements involved can be great for a new writer, since they can take the time to really learn how to do those parts really well, instead of jumping into a something huge and overwhelming right out the gate.