I want to make a case that there is nothing new and also that everything is new. Follow.<\/p>\n
This is on my mind chiefly because I was in a Facebook discussion last night where writer Iain Grant said that he and co-writer Heide Goody were looking at a time travel idea for a novel. (If you don\u2019t know their work, take a gander at their website<\/a>.) He wanted to know if it had been done before.<\/p>\n I knew a few examples that were close and others had more that were similar, some had ones I’d not heard of but are apparently pretty much the same. <\/p>\n Now, one of my more annoying but uncontrollable habits is that if you tell me an idea, I might well wince and say no, it was done in Upstairs, Downstairs or The A-Team. This is specifically the reason I can\u2019t get through Aaron Sorkin\u2019s The Newsroom: as good as it is, he has stories and characters that he\u2019s used so often. There is a part of me that wants to see how The Newsroom handles a particular storyline that was beat for beat the same in Sports Night and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but chiefly because I\u2019m fascinated by how it was romantic in the former but creepy in the latter.<\/p>\n Wait, I suddenly remember having a little row with a script editor who argued that just because I\u2019d seen something done often, that didn\u2019t mean my audience had. That didn\u2019t sway me. I couldn\u2019t write the scene the way he wanted.<\/p>\n Yet in that discussion last night, you could sense Iain beginning to think that nope, he and Heidi should skip it and I really don\u2019t want him to. Nor does anyone else in the chat. And I think it\u2019s for this reason.<\/p>\n Yes, at least parts of the idea have been done before, but it hasn\u2019t been done by Iain Grant and Heide Goody. Until they\u2019ve done it, you can\u2019t know that it would be written better than the previous versions but you can know that it would be different.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure why that\u2019s enough to make me urge them to write it and yet not enough to let me do the same. For me, if I know that an idea has been done before then, so far, I\u2019ve been incapable of doing it. This could be why I never ask on Facebook whether something\u2019s been done before.<\/p>\n Only, there is another reason for this being on my mind today. Earlier yesterday I was on a train reading an unpublished novel that I wrote. Funnily enough, it was about time. Unfunnily enough, it was appallingly bad. So bad that I truly gaped when a search on my Mac happened to turn it up: I had written 70,000 words in 1994 and erased it from my mind immediately afterwards. I\u2019m not sure why I didn\u2019t erase it from my Mac. I might. There\u2019s still time.<\/p>\n A day on and it\u2019s already evaporating from my mind but I did remember how struck I was by one core idea that ran through the second half of the book. Because while the details are different and the relationship is different, it\u2019s otherwise the same idea as in Audrey Niffenegger\u2019s The Time Traveler\u2019s Wife. There\u2019s even a part of it that is the same idea as River Song and the Doctor\u2019s out-of-sequence relationship in Doctor Who.<\/p>\n The Time Traveler\u2019s Wife was published nine years after my novel wasn\u2019t. River Song first appeared in Doctor Who in 2008, fourteen years after my novel didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n There\u2019s something appealing to me about this timey-wimey issue, that two separate time discussions are leading me to how there were at least two great ideas within the novel I wrote. It\u2019s less appealing to me how ferociously bad my writing was in 1994.<\/p>\n I often get pupils in writing workshops asking if they can do something slightly different to what I’ve asked and the answer I’ve grown is always this: yes, if you do it brilliantly. <\/p>\n Maybe that’s the bit I should be focusing on: work at being brilliant instead of working at whether this catalogue in my mind recognises an idea from somewhere else.<\/p>\n I mean, at one point in that novel I wrote the words \u201ca myriad of\u201d. I was young, but I\u2019ll understand if you never talk to me again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I want to make a case that there is nothing new and also that everything is new. Follow. This is … Continue reading