I’m taking the week off from The Scribbler this week to present this short edifying essay, a Criminal Brief exclusive, by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine‘s editor, Linda Landrigan — especially since it supports the point I was trying to make last week. Enjoy! –JLW

THE MYTH OF THE ORIGINAL IDEA

by Linda Landrigan

Good ideas seldom come out of nowhere. They come out of the conversations we have with the world around us. Good ideas seldom lurk by themselves; they run in packs. Ask any book editor. Book editors review hundreds of ideas a week in the form of book proposals.

I’m a short story editor for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. For the past ten years or so I’ve looked at hundreds of stories a week, and what I’ve noticed – and my friends in the book publishing world tell me they see the same thing – is that a lot of stories about the same thing will come in at the same time. For a while I got a lot of stories about people going postal – that was after there were a few high profile accounts of deadly crackups in the workplace. Then for a while it seemed as if every other story opened with a long, lovingly described account of someone getting their brains bashed out, with descriptions of gray matter dripping down the walls. Right now I’m getting a lot of stories describing the rape and murder of young girls. And I mean, not just one or two – fifty or more.

What accounts for the Group Think? Heinous crimes are in the news, and we digest them through art. Obesity is discussed in the media, we think of cookbooks that show us how to incorporate nutritious food into our loved ones meals surreptitiously. In fact I have enough sneaky recipes that I could write a cookbook …

If I were more perspicacious, I could have predicted the current popularity of vampire crime fiction. Some time around the turn of this century, we started getting a lot of vampire stories at AHMM. They didn’t seem to quite fit our mix at the moment, so we didn’t buy any, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why bloodsucking resonated with so many people. Perhaps it is a symbolic reaction to the AIDS epidemic and our sudden fear of bodily fluids. In any case, I didn’t see that those early stories were heralding a trend that was later to show up in novels. But Toni L.P. Kelner and Charlaine Harris also noticed them, and they have collected an excellent sample of them in Many Bloody Returns.

Many editors often miss the one original idea, the one that goes to another house and becomes a best seller. No one loses sleep over it. It’s one of things we editors talk about over a glass of wine.

What editors don’t do is steal ideas and pass them on to other authors. A lot of new writers worry about this when they are sending their lovingly polished manuscript off to the big houses for the first time. If any thing, an editor wants more to discover new talent than to suck the life blood you. If a few months after you submit said manuscript, another book on the same topic is suddenly on the bookshelves with a lot of hoopla, well, then that book was certainly in the pipeline by the time your manuscript crossed the transom. Two people had the same idea at the same time. More than two; probably thousands. A handful of those submissions fell into the hands of sympathetic editors and got published.

Likewise with short stories, especially crime stories. A lot of stories I see have the same general story arc. A husband kills his wife in a clever manner, an astute cop (or neighborhood busybody) figures out who did it. A jealous gardener tricks another gardener to the garden, whacks him on the head with a shovel (brains fly everywhere!), and buries him right there. What do you know, the tea roses thrived! Two high school kids are frustrated because their parents won’t let them go out with each other. They fake their own suicides, with a grand plan to go off on a larcenous tear across the country … but something goes wrong, and well, you know the story.

It’s not the Idea of the story that matters. It’s how it’s told. It’s the writing, the dialogue, the pacing, the particularity of the setting and characters. It’s my sense that even if the premise of a story is one that is old hat, if the characters come alive, pop off the page as if they could walk right into the real world, then the outcome of the story, whether the detective finds the killer or not, will be one of a kind.

I love the stories I publish, and often I go turn to my collection of AHMMs to reread them. I take particular pleasure in dialogue that has the cadence of real speech with pauses and things left unsaid. I love to see a character who is grappling with a crime, also have a life situated in a real place – a hectic radio station on election night, a 19th century whaling ship, a contemplative moment in a patrol car.

A fleshed-out, fully imagined character has a life of his or her own. Plop him or her down in an oft-told tale and the outcome of the story will be different, because the characters responded to the situation in their own unique way. That’s how a spousal murder story becomes a great tragedy, teenage impulsiveness becomes a great love story, and a garden murder becomes more than fertilizer.