Is it just me, or are stories getting more… out there? For example, try 
explaining Inception to a friend. Or watch the trailer for Cowboys and Aliens. Nowadays, stories involving parallel dimension, time travel, environmentally-friendly blue-skinned aliens, and Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse are fairly commonplace.
It makes sense. We’ve become conceptually jaded. Ray Harryhausen‘s stop-animation claymation used to be state-of-the-art. Now it’s ancient history. In fact, CGI, the successor to Sir Ray’s dynamation, has now given birth to advanced 3D technique. How long before we’re watching our films in hologram?
The author is competing in a marketplace whose conceptual boundaries are expanding exponentially.
Okay, so it’s possible to go overboard. One website recently asked Does the Green Lantern movie introduce too many zany creatures? Too many zany 
characters? Is that possible? I mean, did anyone see Hellboy II? Earth elementals, tooth fairies, aquamen, and do-gooding demons. Oh well, better too many than not enough. Especially when the gatekeepers are so… bored.
If storytellers are culture’s “unacknowledged legislators,” as Mark Bertrand suggests in his wonderful book Rethinking Worldview, then imagination is one of the commodities they traffic in. The studio exec and the acquisition editor are not just gatekeepers but conceptual sieves, sifting ideas, premises, and taglines, for public consumption.
And, yes, you can blame them for Scream 4.
So it almost stands to reason that, in order to get a hearing nowadays, you have to let your imagination run wild. I spoke to one literary agent who confessed that, after hearing hundreds of pitches a month, it’s pretty easy to spot something original, different, outside the norm. Conversely, it is pretty easy to get bored. After all, how many boy-meets-girl / boy-gets-girl pitches can one endure without suppressing a yawn?
Throw in a zombie, robot, or a talking plant, and now you’ve got my attention.
In a recent survey, Write to Done asked 10 top writing bloggers about Tips for Writing Excellence. Larry Brooks of Storyfix gave this advice:
Until recently, publishers did all the vetting. Today that power exists in the digital marketplace.
Which means you, the aspiring author, need to play the odds: a “small” story about your grandmother’s childhood in Des Moines is less likely to make a dent in the Amazon rankings than, say, a story that takes an astoundingly compelling concept and sends it sailing over the fence.
So think big.
I wonder how many of us are camping on “small stories”? We’re as far away from an “astoundingly compelling concept” as Kansas was from Oz. So is it any surprise that your query can’t get out of the slush pile?
G.K. Chesterton said the duty of the artist is to remain artistically awake:
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
Your call to the arts is not a vacation but a vocation, a “long vigil,” a “striving against a continual tendency to sleep.” And part of this “artistic vigil” is to remain imaginatively lucid, conceptually un-boxed. To “vary [your] methods of stimulation” in such a way so as to grease the gears of your fancy.
Maybe more than anything else, our culture’s “unacknowledged legislators” are looking for big ideas, new twists, and innovative slants. Yes, it’s evidence that our culture is growing increasingly jaded. But for those of us who traffic in imagination, it’s also evidence that the bar has been raised.
So if you think you’ve nailed your story premise, before you do anything else, find the limits of your credulity, the edges of your imagination envelope and… push it.
* * *
QUESTION: What’s the most wild premise you’ve ever had for a story? What’s kept you from writing it? What are some of the “methods of stimulation” that you use to keep your imagination well-oiled?
I’m having a tough time with this, Mike. I don’t want to sell an interesting situation but a good story — though I realize both can exist simultaneously. It seems like publishing is increasingly becoming a battle for authors to out-gimmick each other more than telling a good story. This isn’t to say all original concepts are gimmicks but if that’s the major selling point is a twist on reality we’re all going to get we’re going to get The da Vinci Code airporters flooding the shelves instead of The Bell Jar — which I guess is fine if that’s what we want.
Perhaps I am saying that, in storytelling, I’m not that opposed to “gimmicks,” provided a “good story” is not sacrificed. It seems much of the pushback I’m getting on this post assumes that you can’t do both. Jay, I appreciate your comments!
I dunno. I’m imagining a world where people focus on telling well the stories they have to tell and stop worrying about how to sell it.
Last night, Kindle had more than 150 free books dumped on it. All of a sudden EVERY self publisher figured out the “start free, then sell for a buck” trick. It seemed like every single book out there was outlandish in some way or another. You had every variety of nightmare creature coupling with one another. There were SO MANY “go big or go home” ideas that they all just blended together in an electronic midden of story.
So much of this advice that writers get is soooo bad.
Meanwhile Bonnet and Buggy romances are selling well.
But they just sell to old ladies.
Well…I think young girls, my target audience, are still very much interested in the things they’ve always been interested it. They are idealistic, they are looking for a purpose in life, they are looking for love, they want to be cherished and needed, they want to do big things. None of that has changed and none of that will ever change.
Today those concepts may be selling in zombie books or feminist or lesbian books. But tomorrow zombie books will be yawners and the girls will be grabbing up prairie books or looking for heroes who will take the lead. The outer shell will keep changing but the enduring, universal longings will stay the same. Boy meets girl/boy gets girl will always sell. And I think what is needed to make it fresh and interesting is not a robot or a talking plant but interesting characters we can relate to and love.
You’re right that the big idea is what grabs the agent and the editor. They ARE jaded. They are wading through 250 queries a day and the big concept is what grabs them, I think. And high concepts grab readers, too. But I don’t think high concept is zombie strippers. I think high concept is taking what is familiar and loved and twisting it enough to give it a fresh feel. (Strippers have never been loved by many of us and changing them to zombies doesn’t give them an air of freshness.) So does our concept have to be way out there or can it be like our beloved chocolate and our delicious peanut butter meeting in a Reece’s cup?
Sally, I agree that traditional motifs are the most enduring. It’s the packaging that is changing. Some people described Avatar as an intergalactic Dances With Wolves. Very simple story wrapped in an incredible package. My point with this post is not to suggest story (packaging) trumps substance, but that we writers do tend to regurgitate the same plots in unimaginative settings to our detriment. Thanks for commenting, Sally.
Regurgitate the same stories in the same settings…yes, I agree that this is a problem.
How about this?
A murder mystery centered around a traveling circus during the 1950s. The amateur sleuth is the circus chaplain. He’s trying to find the culprit while ministering to his tiny flock, which includes the circus strongman, bearded lady, highwire artist, and assorted clowns.
* crickets *
No? Nothing? Okay, I’ll be quiet now.
Dave
Carnivale Meets Water For Elephants Meets Greatest Show On Earth.
I like it, Dave! Just add a zombie stripper and I think you got a winner.
This reminds me of high school in the late eighties through early nineties. There was a generation gap between eighties rockers and the “new” alternative crowd. The alternatives shunned the old weird rockers w/ their big hair and make-up and competed to be the weirdest of the new kind of weird–in dress, behavior, taste, and sexuality. Weirdness can’t substitute for substance, but the guy I knew who slept on a bed of nails w/ his Gothic vampire girlfriend certainly felt more spiritual than others. I’m sure that’s not all he felt. He had chains, too, and all kinds of other torture devices I won’t mention. Ooh, and I knew this girl who had a human skull in her bedroom which she burnt effigies to. She was really weird, not to mention a lesbian, but mostly it was all show. Should I go on?
Weirdness can’t substitute for substance. Many authors are asking what-if questions, but if these what-if questions have no discernible answers, then what’s the point?
The odds are its because of the rebel in me but I sometimes run the other way from “the next big thing.” Just not a band-wagon kind of guy. I remember the night I began reading Ted Dekker’s Immanuel’s Veins and it hit me, “This smells a lot like another vampire story.” Dekker still swears it isn’t. Luckily I read on and realized Dekker was drawing us back into his world of The Circle from yet another angle. Sooner or later though, zombies will be old hat and someone will have to find the next big thing to draw them in.
Sorry, Tim, but zombies NEVER die. Dismembered? Now that’s another story.
I think I do the opposite. My story ideas tend to be WAY out there. So I have to find a way to make the story and the characters seem much more normal than they really are–at least in the beginning. I’m always looking for a common ground, a place where the reader and I can meet so my story will be believable. I like to follow a technique that Stephen King uses. In the beginning, he has one character that doesn’t believe all the weird stuff that’s going on. Then, as that character slowly begins to believe, the story starts to feel creepier and creepier because the reader is sucked right along with the main character.
Merrie, you were one of the inspirations for this post. Seriously. You have such fantastic ideas and a wild imagination. I thought the concept behind Afterlife was compelling. Thanks for being a voice in the wilderness here! And, because iPads are inferior to Xooms, I will manually insert: Merrie’s website.
Mike, thanks so much for kind comments! And, um, thanks for helping your iPad impaired pal. LOL. (One more reason why iPads will one day rule the Earth. They definitely have a mind of their own and they USE it.)
My iPad always destroys my blog link. Argh. So much for technology being my friend.
You asked about inspiration for ideas. I recently discovered storypraxis. I now write a ten minute “wild” seed for a story every day based on the daily “prompt” like the most recent prompt “5over3BOB!” It allows me to get some of the really far out, bizarre story concepts on the page and then step back and look at them with some distance. Already, out of a couple of weeks of this experimental “weirdness” I’ve gotten a least three solid book ideas. Also, I’d comment that C. S. Lewis’ books and Tolkien’s books were on the fringe for their time, particularly his Perelandra series. Weirdness is nothing new. I just thin today’s readers are so bombarded with information overload, it takes something truly outrageous to break through the din and catch their attention. In the end, story will triumph. That should be our focus. We should guard and protect Story at all costs so it will live through this fast paced literary era we are in where a sixth grader can publish a book on Amazon in a heart beat until readers get tired of the mediocrity and once again crave real Story!
Don’t mean to threadjack, but while I agree with the observations don’t you think artists, Christians especially, should strive for longevity over sensationalism?
I’m all for creativity and pushing envelopes, but if you’ve got to resort to the ever-increasing bizarre and surreal, at what point do leave orbit altogether and start putting sphincters on the canvas and calling it art?
Approaches and techniques may differ but I think an artist has to build on solid ground, touch deeper themes. Isn’t that part and parcel of the artist’s calling as well?
Referencing movies, “Avatar” was a mile wide/inch deep, $600 million CGI blockbuster destined not to become a classic. “District 9”, released around the same time, was equally technically remarkable but a thousand times more substantial. I’d rather be known for “D9” all day long. “Inception” has genuine longevity and impact because the story touched on the nature of reality and redemption. The special effects were merely a way to bring the audience there, a vehicle.
It’s a ‘Roots and Wings’ thing . I think an artist – a Christian artist – has to be fearless. And grounded.
Agreed in full. Can’t get much further out there that some of Tolkein’s stuff yet it had legs. Avitar was eye candy that didn’t leave the name of one character in my mind or heart. Fearless and grounded seems to be only achieved by a select few. I recently wrote about this very thing concerning the story line of
Fringe Fringe on FOX TV. Like X-Files, the outlandish part wows you but the underlying story of much needed redemption and love is what lasts with both.
great comment.
I’m wondering if maybe Avatar appealed to a group of people who were more visual? I’m not sure, but the first half of my life I was a fine artist and strong visuals will catch me every time. For me, one scene in that movie made it an instant classic, one that I’ll watch over and over and never forget. It’s the scene where the two main characters are walking through the forest and every place they put their feet, the ground lights up. For me, that was an instant visual reminder of the scripture, “Your Word is a lamp unto my feet.” I know that might not seem like much of a take away from the movie, but it’s one that I will never forget. I can SEE that scripture come to life now and it helps me to remember how real God’s word is. On the other hand, I own District 9 (I own Avatar too), but I’ve never watched it more than once and I don’t really have any strong memories or feelings about it. (I know it had some strong, excellent themes, it’s just that they didn’t stick with me. I’d have to watch the movie again and take notes to bring them back to mind.)
Hmmm…
Different strokes… and all that, but there’s quite a gap between associations you made with a particular visual and the film’s inherent themes. Like I said, it’s a blockbuster, no doubt. I just wouldn’t classify it as a classic in terms of substance.
I guess I’ll sort of play devil’s advocate and say, the true test of a writer is whether they can make the ordinary interesting. Especially, like you say, in this day and age where there is so much competing for our audience’s attention.
As a writer I should be able to make any situation, any scene interesting, even if all my character is doing is picking her nose.
‘Course, this could be my literary snob talking.