Right now you’re going “You mean like the books I read?”

No. Obviously as a reader, most books aren’t yours. And while I’m told it’s allowable and righteous to borrow books from all your friends, neighbors and absolute strangers, and to troll the rejects bin (or the dumpster) of used bookstores, it is generally considered unrighteous and… for some reason, illegal to outright rip books off strangers’ hands and run off with them. Though if you’re really out of all reading material (the horror, the horror) and need it a like minded bibliophile judge or a jury of your true peers will probably let you go with a slap on the wrist.

But what I’m talking about here is as a writer. I suppose the title should be “ideas that aren’t yours” but that would get us into that despicable bottom feeder of writing groups: the idea thief. (Yes, we know ideas aren’t copyrighteable, but there’s nothing worse than telling someone what you’re working on and next week they bring something like to the group. Worse, it often reads like a lame pastiche. Also, while on that it’s worse if they write the lame pastiche after you presented your story to the group. And it’s much worse if you’re fairly sure they don’t know they’re doing it. Now, we all steal from each other. My story Mom Fights the Dragon was stolen from my younger son, who wrote it as a comic at 4. In my defense, I really couldn’t come up with an idea, and it was … 14 years later. I offered him credit but at the time he was convinced he’d never want to be a writer. [He got better. Also I suppose it’s hilarious that the kid who was drawing and writing functional comics at 4 is now a comics editor. Life is weird.])

What I mean is something much weirder. And I call it books because that’s how my ideas tend to come. As fully realized books, though the words might not be there yet, until I sit down, tune in, and let the book dictate itself. (Lately they arrive as 3 to 6 book series. Help.)

But even so, I know they’re mine, because some aren’t MINE to write. The idea this brings up is bizarre, because it amounts to someone with ideas on wide dispersal, hosing down the world, so which head they go into is random. This is not quite true, though it might be when you start out. Because you don’t know what your ideas are, so you are open to all of them. You tend to “receive” a narrow band of ideas you can and should write. Oh, I don’t mean there’s someone hosing ideas in, either. (That way lie tin foil hats.) It’s just an image for how it works.

The two examples from my life are the time …. Um, so everyone knows when the kids were younger and we were comprehensibly broke (something I was loathe to admit, and the reason a lot of you probably think I made the most bizarre excuses not to attend your con or get together. I did. We were broke most of the time and the boys ate us and read us out of house and home on the regular) I wrote a lot of work for hire. Weirdly no media tie ins, which is good because I don’t think any of those are mine. I don’t watch anything pretty much. My ghost writing was mostly ghost writing the type I can’t disclose or big lawyers come after me. I’ll tell you only that one of those which I got to do the world build and everything for from a very loose idea (the circumstances were weird and special) not only became a bestseller but became a bestselling series. This is good and bad. I know I can do it, and probably only a combination of luck/dirty tricks prevented it happening with my under-my-name stuff. AND it drives me insane. Anyway, moving right along…

At one time when we were broker (totally a word) than living heck, and had some big expense coming up, I got offered a job, writing a thriller. It was all set in Washington, and it was one of those, you know “In the corridors of power, there’s a plot forming.” I wanted to do that job. It was 10k that would solve all our problems. But I looked at the plot, and looked at the plot, and there was no way I could do it. No way at all. My mind doesn’t bend that way. I don’t read or like that type of book. The closest to thriller I read is Repairman Jack by F. Paul Wilson, and I couldn’t twist that plot to be that kind of quirky lone wolf for justice thing.

It tells you how much I hated to nope that job that I remember it 17 years later.

The other one is an idea I hope David Pascoe will still write with me, sometimes, maybe after the kids are grown up? (Because kids eat your brain.)

It’s a lovely military fantasy, and I know the entire story. I have one huge, major problem: I can’t speak military. As in, at all. It’s like a disability. The woman who can learn any dialect and/or historical speak by reading a book series, is utterly incapable of doing mil-speak or mil-mind: as in how a military functions and/or interacts. So, this leads to not being able to write that idea AT ALL. (The dragons, I think I can do, by making it more about the group, which will be run in a very non-military way, since they tend to be couples, and….) Not on my own. And David is wonderful with it. BUT… yeah. He has a life. (My ducttape kids, like my kids, resist being drafted into things at the drop of a hat. For reasons I don’t understand, really.)

There are ideas I could write — the ideas that other people wrote — only they wouldn’t be the same at all. Take if I stole the idea for Black Tide Rising: a virus that creates human “zombies” takes over the Earth. Mine would be completely different from John Ringo’s, and probably not half as good. (No, I have NO intentions of doing this. Ever. Because mine wouldn’t be half as good.)

Anyway, the funniest thing about all this, and what you should be aware of, is that sometimes you think you can write an idea, but you can’t at all. This usually happens when you’re green as leeks. You start writing it, and it’s really hard and…. If you’re lucky you end up realizing the idea is incompatible with your head, and you let it go, and don’t spend 20 years trying to write it.

And that what’s “your story” changes. Ideas you couldn’t write at all, or couldn’t write with any degree of success, suddenly are possible when you have more practice and are older and have more life-experience. Arguably No Man’s Land is one of those. Not the novel, but the setting. I wrote 8 novels set in Elly and while they might have been publishable, in an earlier and more adventurous sf/f field, they were still weird and maimed, because I couldn’t juggle the perspectives and convey what I wanted to. Now I can. So, there’s that. And it’s a good thing. Sometimes you fight with the world/idea, realize it can’t happen, set it down and years later you can write it, and do. Hopefully enough time left to me to do the story justice.

The inverse happens too. I am going through stories started a long time ago and trying to finish them/let them fly. Now that I can write whatever I want, without publisher shackles, I want to get these novels/series out of my head before I die.

But some of them are not stories I can tell anymore. I somehow got out of a much more internal/interior mode of story telling, and I need things happening on the regular, to keep my interest going.

Most of them fortunately can change.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m weird. I keep running into things with people telling writers how to get ideas. Or how to build a story. Or–

I don’t have that problem. They rain on me from — somewhere. (I should really get a tinfoil hat? Maybe?) — and my job is to figure out if they’re mine or can be made mine.

And if not, to let it fly away.

I’ve seen other writers destroy themselves by marrying themselves to ideas they can’t write and which will never work.

So, for the record: If you love an idea but it doesn’t love you? Let it got. It might come back to you later in life, and you might write it. And if it doesn’t? Maybe it will full into a willing and appropriate head that forgot its tinfoil hat.

Ideas by themselves are nothing. It’s the execution that makes them fly. Don’t execute them with a guillotine.