Brainstorm. Churn up the “train of thought” express.
Don’t worry that a good idea is “nothing new.” Google the key words of absolutely any idea, and you’ll find a couple million places where it’s essentially been said before.
Many an oft-repeated phrase exhibits remarkable staying power: Umpires, for example, have cried “Batter Up!” for well over a century, yet our ear never tires of hearing those words for the first time each spring.
It’s the difference between a classic word that fits like a well-pilled cardigan, and a threadbare cliché on a dark and stormy night: If it ain’t right, it must be trite.
Millions of literary works – books, movies, short stories, TV and radio shows, stage plays, you name it – have followed one simple plot line: Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins back girl’s heart.
But the devil is in the details – the plot line needs a fresh twist somewhere along the line.
Take heart though. The sheer power of mathematics is on the Writer’s side:
• A word is a word
• Two words can be rearranged 2 ways, three words in 6, and four in 24 ways.
• But extend that math to a 25-word sentence, you’ll amaze yourself to discover 15.5 septillion combinations of those 25 words ... in round numbers, that’s a 15 followed by 23 zeroes (1,511,210,043,331,000,000,000,000).
The written masterpiece is constructed one letter, one word at a time. That’s true whether the “masterpiece” is a tire store’s marketing brochure, Hunt for Red October or the Gettysburg Address.
It’s virtually impossible to plagiarize without paying careful attention to reproduction of a text laying open on the desk in front of you. Contemporary prose, after all, is nothing more than a fresh look at an old idea.
It’s true. Cavemen no doubt grew weary hearing the same old tales of the hunt regurgitated around the campfire night after night.
Yet it wasn’t until eons later that a Jewish comic from Brooklyn made a million by scripting that most immortal of comebacks ...
Yada, yada, yada ...
Next: Every good writer needs a list of pet peeves
[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]
No comments:
Post a Comment