This week I made the painful decision to retire a story I loved. Written in 2008, I’ve spent the past five years shopping it to 15 different markets without success. On my final attempt, I sent it to Spark: A Creative Anthology. This is the reply I received from the editor-in-chief, Brian Lewis:
“I have decided not to include this piece in an upcoming volume of the anthology. The writing was excellent, the pacing and dialogue were superb, the backdrop of an outback community was expertly painted, but the story itself was too familiar—even in this new setting. ‘Benevolent alien/monster is misunderstood by humans and injured/killed before he can share his wisdom/ technology /healing’ has been done numerous times, and this retelling didn’t add enough unique elements to make it stand out. “However, as I said, the craft itself was top-notch, and I would be absolutely delighted to read more of your work in the future.”
He is, of course, absolutely right. That story idea has been done to death, most famously in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), while thematically the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963) is probably even more similar. In retrospect I’m mortified that a) I didn’t pick up on these similarities before I wrote the story and b) I continued to circulate this story even after a slush reader mentioned The Man Who Fell to Earth in a rejection note back in 2009.
Why did I do that? Quite simply, ‘An Odd Man in Opal Creek’ was a story close to my heart. Like a too-proud parent, I was wilfully blind to its deficiencies. That’s because it contains two things I love: a turtle that visited me in the most peaceful dream I have ever had, and a vivid vision of an outback community that is somehow cosy despite its unknowing bigotry.
Since ‘An Odd Man in Opal Creek’ is never likely to see print, I have decided to publish it on my website. Have a read of it and let me know what you think.
The lesson I have taken away from the Odd Man Saga is the title of this blog post. While I believe there are some good ideas in my story, the central one – ie, the one that matters – is old news. In genre fiction, if you don’t have a good idea, you don’t have anything.