Is Your Story Idea Good Enough to be a Published Novel?

A rather scary thought for the new writer, but an important one: The average novel takes 3-7 years to complete. Yup, and that doesn’t include the time to submit your work over and over (and over) in the hopes of getting it published, nor the amount of time you will wait to actually see your writing in print.

If you’re going to spend so much time on a single project, you should be certain that your idea is worth the effort. After all, if your idea is great but not quite what it takes to fill the number of pages for a novel, you could spend much less time crafting it into a tightly-woven short story.

Taking a few minutes to ask yourself some questions about your novel idea will help you decide if your idea is, in fact, novel worthy.

Originality Really Counts

In more sarcastic moments, I often find myself staring at my story ideas and think, “There is nothing original left in the world.”

There aren’t too many themes to life, if we’re being honest. Love, hate, struggle, and adventure are the overriding ones which can quickly be broken down into the classic topics – unrequited or forbidden love, the hatred between a very good man and a very bad one, the struggle of a person overcoming misfortune, etc. Ugh, yeah, it’s easy to get cynical.

The trick is to look at the same themes in a new way. With every year that passes, things happen in our rapidly evolving world that show us old problems in a new light. We grow as people with every day we live, and our insights can change just as quickly. So the same old forbidden love story of Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story can become something totally new if we use the insights we have in the lives we live today. In its base core, the story is still the same theme, but it is told in a new way.