NovaJinx writes about "A Few Cool Ideas" and how they're meaningless and virtually worthless. He's doing it in the context of fiction writing, and makes the point that successful writers don't care about cool ideas. Successful writers worry about characterization, and dialogue. And he's right.

I've run into a version of this conceit in engineering, time and again. Outsiders get what they think is a great idea for a program, or a device, and ask how they go about licensing it to someone else who will take care of all the implementation and sales and manufacture, while yielding a fat percentage of the profit back to our genius. Or they want to know how to protect their ideas so they aren't stolen.

It usually takes a while to explain to such people that their ideas are worthless. Those kinds of ideas are easy, and plentiful. It's the implementation, and the manufacture, and the sales -- that's the tough part. I think the best way to explain it is this joke: have you heard of the woman who was married four times and was still a virgin?

It's the day of her fourth wedding, and she and her new husband are about to go to bed for their wedding night. She says, "Dear, I have a confession to make. I'm still a virgin." He was dumfounded, knowing of her three previous marriages.

She explained, "My first marriage was a May-December marriage of convenience. He was a wonderful man, but sex didn't play any part in it, and then he died of old age. My second husband was young and virile, but in a freak accident he was hit by a car just as we left the church. My third husband was a programmer."

"What has that got to do with you being a virgin?"

"Well, all he'd ever do is sit on the side of the bed and tell me how great it was going to be."

Edison said that invention was 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, and he overestimated the inspiration. The real value is in grinding it out. Real engineers ship. Real writers write. A lot. Coming up with ideas is the easy part.

UPDATE: By the way, that's the reason why an anime with a really silly or strange concept can turn out to be a masterpiece. Girls driving tanks? You're kidding, right? Because it isn't the fundamental concept that makes a great, or a bad, show. It's the mundane stuff: characterization and fundamental story telling. Good dialogue, keeping the characters in character, making things happen and making everyone deal with the things in ways which the audience will believe. That's where the genius lies, and if you can do those things you can make a masterpiece out of nearly any concept.

UPDATE: That's why Rowling is the second richest women in Britain now, after the Queen. Yeah, the Potter books have a few neat ideas in them, but that's not what has made her rich.

It's that she spent all the time and hard work cranking out prose, which made those characters real to the readers, and made the readers believe they existed in that place and time, doing all those things. That's where the genius lies, not in the cool ideas. Rowling is rich now because of hard work and talent, but there's a reason why successive books took 1-3 years each to write. It takes that long (and sometimes even longer) to do it right.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 09:43 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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