Those Who Can

From a newsgroup post dated April 10, 2007:

Down in another newsgroup a couple of people posted pitches for their unpublished novels. I wasn’t impressed — in fact, I thought both were pretty lame, though the novels might not be.

I should have just let it go, but I didn’t — I rewrote ’em both.

I pretended this was an educational effort, but I’m pretty sure I was just showing off.

The thing is, though, that the reason I bothered to do it was that it was so easy. I mean, both pitches contained, as originally written, all the elements needed to make a good pitch — plot, setting, character — but they didn’t make it sound interesting.

One of them spent too long explaining how a disaster happened, when the novel is about the after-effects of the disaster. Who cares why it happened? The cool stuff is what the survivors have to do afterward!

The other had long unpronounceable names all over it, when what matters is the romantic triangle of a mad lord, his loyal henchman, and the courtesan secretly plotting the lord’s overthrow.

They could both be great stories — but alas, I’ll bet they aren’t. It’s a shame.

And it demonstrates a couple of things:

That it’s not the idea that matters, it’s the execution.*

Why I stopped trying to teach writing — it’s too frustrating, seeing all this potential that’s never going to be properly used. That romantic triangle could be a classic, done right, but the odds that it’s done right are mighty slim.

Feist’s Corollary: There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently untalented writer can’t fuck it up.**

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* My great-great grandfather was born on an estate in Maine named Execution. It’s kind of a family mystery why anyone would name a house that, but it almost certainly has something to do with the concept that it’s the execution that matters.

The house is now a hole in the ground in the middle of a forest; the only part of the estate that hasn’t gone back to wilderness is the family burial plot, which is maintained by veterans’ groups because there’s a Revolutionary War hero buried there. They consistently put the Memorial Day flag and flowers on the wrong grave, though — there were lots of Goodwins with the same few names. So much for execution.

** This corollary to Watt-Evans’ Law is the only time I have ever seen Ray Feist use the word “fuck.” I think I cleaned it up for the version on my webpage, but this is the original.

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