You know that saying, “There’s nothing new under the sun”? It’s true. Painfully, heartbreakingly true.
I completed my first full-length novel in 2001. ‘Full’ being the operative word; ever since I had read Magician by Raymond E. Feist I had wanted to try my hand at writing a sprawling fantasy epic. It came out at 180,000 words, the length recommended in Stephen King’s On Writing, and it wound up being nothing but a very long and exhausting creative writing class. I’ve had a few goes at knocking that manuscript into shape over the years, but it is beyond servicing. I would have to rewrite the entire thing from scratch, and I just don’t care enough about it to do that.
If not for a rather cruel twist of fate, however, The Quest for Malodian could have been my second completed novel.
Back in 1998, my wife and I had been going out for about a year. She was only 17 and she was studying for her Higher School Certificate, sometimes up to eight or ten hours a day towards the end. We were young and in love, so rather than spending the time apart, I would join her in the study at her parents’ house and work on my first attempt at a novel.
I had a fantastic idea, you see. A criminal carjacks this guy in an attempt to flee the authorities, but little does he know the driver is a cuckold who doesn’t want to live any more…
Well, I’d written about 50,000 words, I believe, when I rented the movie Nothing to Lose on videotape. Dread began to pool in my heart as I watched my novel’s storyline play out on the TV screen. The only real difference was that I had written mine as an action-drama and Nothing to Lose was a comedy.
Work on Carjack ceased that day, and two months of hard graft went down the drain.
It was my first lesson in how hard it can be to formulate a truly original idea. Common life experiences mean two writers can sometimes come up with the same idea independently of each other. and this is doubly true in genre fiction, where there are certain conventions and tropes, and any story will have at least partially defined parameters.
So let me close with a big FUCK YOU to writer/director Steve Oedekirk, who had the gall to come up with my first great idea before I did.