The Fire in Fiction (34 page)

Is there such a thing as a bad premise for a story? Without a doubt some story ideas feel familiar. Bandwagon syndrome pretty much guarantees that something successful will soon have imitators. If the imitators are successful you can count on a trend. If a trend lasts, then you can put money on it: that kind of story within a few years will be done to death.

Then again, can we say that whodunits have been done to death? Love conquers all? Save the world? No, these story patterns are durable. They are durable because they are flexible. There are thousands of ways to figure out whodunit. True love has infinite obstacles. The world always needs saving, too, and in different ways in every new decade.

In evaluating manuscripts I look for original stories, but is there anything new under the sun? Not really. Every novel has antecedents. Every author has influences. It is impossible to be wholly original; even so, some novels feel fresh and shake us with their insight. How is that effect achieved, especially when the novel in question is a mystery, romance or thriller of a type we've read a hundred times before?

Mainstream and literary fiction too can feel thin, derivative, or lackluster. If you have you ever read a tastily written debut literary novel that left you feeling hungry, or if you have trudged through four hundred pages of well-reviewed women's fiction only to feel like you've

made this journey to self-discovery before, then you know what I mean. What gives a novel not only freshness but the force of the new?

Originality comes not from your genre, setting, plot, characters, voice, or any other element on which you can work. It cannot. It isn't possible. Originality can come only from what you bring of yourself to your story. In other words, originality is not a function of your novel; it is a quality in you.

Are you writing, let's say, a mystery novel? Bad news: you are not the first person to think of starting your story with a murder. Sorry. You are not even close to the front of the line of authors who have created quirky and appealing detectives, either. Too bad. But you do have one advantage over thousands of other mystery writers: You can make your murder and your detective utterly and uniquely your own.

If you are writing mainstream or literary fiction you're covered, right? No worries that your story will feel overly familiar, yeah? How could it possibly? No one's written this story before. Sorry to say, but plenty of mainstream and literary novels do not show us the world in a different way, let alone rock us to the core. What gives any novel the impact of the new is something that does not come from plot or milieu but from a perspective: yours.

Where so many manuscripts go wrong is that, if they do not outright imitate, they at least do not go far enough in mining the author's experience for what is distinctive and personal. So many manuscripts feel safe. They do not force me to see the world through a different lens. They enact the author's concept of what their novel
should
feel like to read rather than what their inner storyteller urgently needs to say. Novelists by and large do not trust themselves. They do not believe that their perspective is important.

Everyone's angry about something. Everyone has been through different things than you or I. Others notice stuff that you and I miss, get passionate about matters that the rest of us haven't considered, or at least not in that way. People are fascinating, don't you find? That means so are you. Your take on the world is not only valid, it is necessary. Your story is not any old story, it is a story that only you can tell and only your own way.