There is no such thing as a new idea

I know some writers fear the blank page. I’m not one of them.

I love a new idea and I love exploring it while plotting and world building and working out who my characters are.

I love starting a new manuscript. It’s after that the wheels fall off. What was once a fantastic shiny new idea is now nothing but a tarnished pile of junk. I become convinced that it was a dumb idea and that even if it was a good idea I have now ruined it and I haven’t done enough research, and that someone else has done it better and I shouldn’t even bother.

Most of the time I shake those feelings off and remind myself that there hundreds of thousands of Cinderella stories, a billion billionaires and more Dukes in romance than have ever existed in the history of the world. 

There is no such thing as a new idea.

What I bring to that idea is my life experiences and my way of seeing the world. The way I tell it makes it different. That doesn’t mean it won’t end up being a trash pile left by the road of the ebook super highway—not every book can be a flying car zooming straight to the NYT best seller list, though it would be really nice to soar to those illustrious heights.  

All of this knowledge doesn’t stop the doubts from trying to throw sand in the gears to jam up my creativity machine, but it does mean I know how to clean them out and keep going until I have a finished first draft and can get a second opinion from my critique partners.

It's never been as and as I feared, nothing that a cut and polish wouldn't fix.