Apex Book Company

I dreamed one night that my sister had adopted a skeletal chicken as a pet. It was a creepy little thing, naturally, but she would smile maternally as it skittered around on its little skeletal feet, clacking its wings. “Isn’t he cute? His name is Butterscotch!”

He wasn’t cute, but I woke up intrigued as always by the subconscious mind, thinking Eureka! I’ll write a story about a skeletal chicken called Butterscotch. But before thinking about opening a crisp white word document, I went to Google. Why? Because that’s what writers have to do now when they get an idea, especially in the horror and paranormal genres, where this byline repeats like a metronome…it’s all been done…it’s all been done…it’s all been done.

This mantra divides writers into two teams. The first team insists established themes should be avoided at all costs; no ghosts, vampires, aliens, possessed children and the like. The second team takes the more optimistic it’s not the subject, but what you do with it that makes it original stance. They’re both right. The bummer comes when you think you’ve carved out an original idea, only to find out after the story’s published that someone else had the same original thought (usually Stephen King). This is why I had to Google a damned skeletal chicken while drinking my morning coffee. For all I knew there was an entire underground genre for skeletal chickens I just wasn’t hip to yet.

Of course some enjoy repeatedly reading a certain theme, evidenced by the row of mass market mystery thrillers in your local drug store. We’ve all made a stop on the way to the beach when the library or the local Borders was too much of a pain in the ass, and we needed some fast food entertainment. I did this recently, scouring the back cover blurbs of one paperback after another. Beautiful women are being murdered, the first one told me. A serial killer is targeting beautiful young girls, said the second. When the mutilated bodies of beautiful women start washing up on the shore… And so on down the line. Damn, aren’t ugly people worthy of killing anymore?

But I suppose every genre has a limited pool to choose from. In the past year I’ve read three women’s fiction novels about a gal who returns home for a family emergency only to discover the real problem is her own sheltered life, until a mysterious stranger awakens her spirit, and her vagina. So why do paranormal writers agonize so much over originality?

Perhaps it’s because the paranormal is so unlimited…in theory anyway. We don’t have to pick from a grab bag of beautiful dead women or eccentric yet wise old neighbors if we don’t want to. We can make new creatures and concepts, outrageous ideas unlimited by the confines of reality. Or we can explore the angle Hitchcock and Stephen King use so well; familiarity gone awry. Take something normal and comfortable like birds or cars and twist it into a unique shape to form a novel idea.

Butterscotch?

But the challenge is part of the lure of writing, isn’t it? And those rare occasions that we’re sure our imaginations have stumbled on something fresh, and we’ve successfully researched the archives of skeletal chicken literature and found no like minded stories, we relax a bit, and open that crisp white word document. And struggle to block out the voice that tells us someone on the other side of the globe has plucked the thought from our mind, and is writing their skeletal chicken story even as we peck.

But at the very least, we can try to get there first. Now if you’ll excuse me, Butterscotch is waiting.

END

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.