The Graveyard of Bad Ideas

And other danger zones on the route to publication

Happy New Year, one and all! I realize it’s been the New Year for almost a month now, but things happen. Our holiday decorations are still heaped in plastic storage bins in a public room of the house. Time achieves new meaning in deep midwinter.

But with the new year comes a need for new projects, and for any writer the politics of project selection looms large. A common question I am sometimes asked is “where do you get your ideas?” But that question isn’t the crucial one. The crucial one is, what should I do with all these bad ones?

Bad novel ideas are the quicksand of a career writing novels. For one thing, most novels tend to be brought to publishers in full manuscript form. Nonfiction books typically sell based on a proposal, but novels sell after the whole book is written; in the case of a writer of predominantly historical fiction, that means after all the research is done, all the outlining, the full draft, and usually a full revision after careful beta reading. It’s a hefty investment of limited resources: of time, and attention, and energy. If that investment doesn’t pay off in a sellable book, you’re toast.

Some novelists work quickly. Lauren Willig, for instance, routinely publishes more than one book a year. (She is also a lovely human being. Dangit Lauren, making us all look bad.) I, however, am not one of those novelists. The fastest I have ever written a novel was Conversion, which took me just under a year from concept to completion, and that was because it relied on all the same historiography as Physick Book. I didn’t have to do any fresh research.

A True Account was probably second fastest, and it still took just under a year from concept to completion. It was also already under contract, which means a publisher was waiting for it. Always a motivating factor.

As I emerged sputtering from my year of three books (in which Astor came out in September 2023, A True Account in November 2023, and The Penguin Book of Pirates the following April 2024), my overstuffed brain was drowning in competing new novel ideas. I even had different time periods vying for my attention. Usually I start writing long before I actually start writing, by settling on a time period and letting it run continuously in the background of my mind while I carry on doing other things. But in this case, my background program kept tripping up. Were we running Gilded Age New York, or early nineteenth century? What about the 1790s? No, Gilded Age. No, not Gilded Age. The gears ground together, seized up, and stalled. This condition is called “burnout.”

As readers of this newsletter know, I shut down the program for a bit. Turn off the car, step away. I turned my attention to my dissertation instead, which I hope to defend successfully this spring. Then I can loudly say “that’s Doctor Howe to you” without provocation and will have regalia I can wear to breakfast. But in the course of forcing my attention to recalibrate itself, to shake off the burnout, I seized upon a new novel idea. The gears kicked into place. The program started running again. I ordered some books for research. I found myself getting excited.

The problem? The new fresh idea, the one I could see so clearly forming in my mind, the one that was shaking me out of my funk and making me brim with excitement and readiness to write, was a bad one.

“How do you know?” you are probably wondering. On the face of it, this idea - a retelling of a classic work of American literature, from the perspective of a major woman character who is forceful and exhilarating and who has a compelling back story most of us don’t know, set in the 1750s, a sort of James meets The Vaster Wilds - shouldn’t necessarily be bad. There’s precedent for this kind of book. It’s in my wheelhouse, of working across the boundaries of history, historiography, and fiction. It could be seen as an origin myth contributing to the American revolution, and next year is the 250th anniversary of 1776.

But a bad idea it was. The source material is problematic and dated. The story would be politically challenging to do well, as it necessarily must involve Indigenous characters. The woman character is not instantly recognizable by name. She looms large in my imagination, but perhaps not in yours (or anyone else’s, for that matter). What makes this novel idea bad is not the concept, nor even necessarily the execution (though, who knows until you know). The idea is bad because it would result in a novel that would not speak to readers. It would speak only to me.

(Photo of me in mid-burnout, credit Beowulf Sheehan)

So what’s next?

Fortunately, I have a wise agent, who is unafraid of telling me bluntly when I am kidding myself. The importance of agents is fuel for another post, and she wasn’t the only one to tell me this idea should be consigned to the graveyard of bad novel ideas, where I am still mourning its loss. But she was the ringer of the death knell. I went into deep mourning for a time. But I am beginning to emerge. I’m dressed in gray, not black. Half-mourning.

I’ll have a few public events come springtime. My dissertation defense is not one of them, but if I pass you’ll probably be able to hear the screaming.

In the meantime, my background program is running again. The gears are moving. It’s a good feeling to know that I can love other ideas too. Good ones? Time will tell.