Write and Sell When You Combine Ideas

A couple of centuries after her death, Jane Austen is hugely popular. Someone had a bright idea: why not combine Austen and zombies? A natural pairing right?

Oddly enough, it worked. Since Jane Austen's material is in the public domain, the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies appeared in 2009, and was very successful. According to Wikipedia, The New Yorker's reviewer wasn't impressed. She 'called the book's estimated blend of eighty-five percent Austen's words and fifteen percent Grahame-Smith's "one hundred per cent terrible".’That may well have been true, but you can’t argue with success.

Combining two ideas often works.

You can combine anything:

*    Blogging and food. Result: a food blog;

*    Job hunting and writing. Result: a nonfiction book about looking for a job, and the funny things which happened to you. Or, a novel about someone who loses his job, and how his spoiled and over-indulged wife and children react to that;

*    A traumatic experience and journaling. Result: a book you create from your journal because it helps you to process the trauma.
How many ideas do you have over the course of a day? Chances are that you have dozens. Look over your writing journal, and choose two or three ideas at random. Now combine them. Write a page about how you might treat the combined ideas — you’ll find that you now have the nugget of a better, stronger story. Note — this works just as well for writing nonfiction as it does for fiction.

Combining ideas works because of the way your mind works
Your mind tosses up ideas via a process of association. Whatever you’re working on, you’ll find that the process of writing generates ideas. if you’ve been collecting these ideas, they form the seeds of future projects.

Exercise 25. Find two ideas you like, and combine them.

You could follow the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies example. Why not write: The Time Machine and Vampires.

The full text of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is available on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35 Add some vampire material to that, and you’re all set. As far as I can tell, no one has used that idea yet, so use it in good health.

Of course, you don’t need to combine ideas into a book — combine them into a short story, or an article.