QUICK QUICK BEFORE SOMEONE ELSE DOES IT FIRST
On Ideas and Speed
Hi friends,
I was in B&N the other day, and I saw a picture book on the shelf that I tried to write. You might remember, this time last year, a cute little Northern Saw-whet Owl1 (one of the BEST owls) hitched a ride in the tree that would be come the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. My records show that I saw the news on Twitter even before the media could write up a story and sent my long-suffering agent (<3 u Michael) an all caps email: DID YOU SEE THIS OWL OMG IT NEEDS TO BE A PICTURE BOOK. Records indicate he was wary at first but I threw a manuscript at him less than 24 hours later (whether that was a good idea or not). And he sent it out and roughly 24 hours after that, we were already hearing back from editors that they’d already seen a few manuscripts about this floating around, and one was by a celebrity, and they politely passed on my version of it. Less than a week after all this, we both saw a deal posted in Publishers Weekly for the book that I would see a year later on the shelf in my local B&N.
Am I bitter about it? A tiny bit! But not a whole lot. I got beat to the punch and/or their manuscript was better or whatever or all those things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ C’est la vie. It happens. Of course, this comprised a few days work for me and my agent (thank you again, Michael!) and I know it feels different when it’s a longer book, a whole novel or proposal, one you’ve been working on for months or years (and years and years). If you’re worried this could happen to you, if you feel a heat rising up the back of your neck, take a deep breath. It’s much, much less likely that someone is writing the exact same book as you, especially if it is a novel, and still less likely if it’s non-fiction (unless it is about a very specific cultural/historical moment/event, then the likelihood goes up some, but probably not as much as you think).
So what do you do? Write your book! You don’t know where anyone else is in the process, but waiting isn’t going to help matters. But also, don’t let that feeling of OMG I HAVE TO HURRY I’M GOING TO MISS OUT SOMEONE IS GOING TO STEAL MY IDEA!!! take over your brain and attention and prevent you from doing your best work. You can’t control what anyone else is doing. You can’t control whether someone has “your” idea or not, whether it’s “better” than yours or not, or whether they get there first. Obsessing over it is only going to slow you down, sap your creativity, and you’ll be letting them “beat” you before you even get out of the gate.
And, your book might be better. Your book might get to just the right agent or editor at just the right time, someone with a specific hole to fill on their list that’s just right for your work. Or not! You cannot control any of that, at any time, in any way, except by writing your thing, so you might as well try. I know that lack of control is hard to take, especially in the face of the time, energy, resources, and work—all unpaid!—it takes to make a book happen. It’s not fair, as I’ve said many times. But you definitely won’t be the one whose idea gets picked if you don’t try.
I invite you, too, not to worry that someone is going to “steal” your idea—an agent or editor or another writer. We’re really not going to. I promise. From this side, the publishing side, we have so many ideas floating around us at any moment that there’s just no time to cherry pick one, hand it to another author, and let them write a whole book about it. You and another author might have the same idea at the same time, whether it’s about a stowaway owl or WWII female fighter pilots or a witch that does a certain thing and you can’t do anything about that either. We already talked about how there’s nothing new under the sun, expect what you do with it. So go do it.
[For those of you agog that I could write a picture book text that fast, my agent could send it out that fast, and editors could read it that fast, believe me, I was surprised, too. I highly, highly, highly doubt that would happen again for me, for several reasons, but believe it was purely a function of the timeliness of the story and the likelihood, a certainty we would come to find out, that someone else was also doing it, too. This kind of turnaround comes at a high cost (thank you, Michael!) and one that cannot happen repeatedly, especially now. Just because it can happen that fast, doesn’t mean it should, or that it should happen that fast routinely. It might have had the tiniest, tiniest little bit to do with some editors knowing my name, but not as much as you would think (considering the response times of my other projects, lol). So, yes it happened quickly. I was lucky. It will never happen that fast for me again.]
I probably am not going to write another ripped from the headlines picture book. It’s taxing. But I’d happily write one about another owl. (Editors, call Michael.)
OXOXOXOX,
Kate
One of the most devastating, DEVASTATING things for me was, when I was a year and a half into a project, about 250,000 words of research and manuscript written, was clicking a goodreads contest from Twitter, only to find that the book was EXACTLY like the book I was writing. The only difference I think was choir kids vs band kids. The MC even had my dog's name.
I get that there is nothing new under the sun, but this book was so similar to what I was writing--I had to scrap the whole thing. I cried about it. I was really angry. I still, out of spite, haven't read that other book.
I wish I was a faster writer sometimes. Or a better writer. Or that my good ideas were more frequent.
I had a weird few moments where something I'd sent to a workshop that was 'unrealistic' in a sci-fi story later popped up in physics news. Black hole cosmogony isn't new, but the way it was written about looked just like dialogue I was writing. And then there were the wormholes... oh the wormholes.
Still not published the book. I'm on the fence about querying it when 80% of my fanbase says to go self-pub, but I feel the book might benefit from that longer process. We'll see. They are doing a good job of convincing me at the moment.