The "I have an idea, you can write it" tango

[womzilla]

crowleycrow describes a situation familiar to any professional writer (or anyone who has spent any time actually listening to writers talk about the life of writing):

How often have we found ourselves in bars or parties listening to the conceptions (or worse the life stories) of people who have discovered we've written a book or books, or been trapped with someone who has generously offered to share with us a new, a strange, an absolutely unprecedented conception for a book, a story that ACTUALLY HAPPENED to our interlocutor or his cousin or lover.  We are invited to split the profits on the resulting work (60-40, 60 for him or her as having actually experienced or conceived the work.) "All you have to do," we are told, "is write it."

tomsdisch gives two suggestions for dealing with such people. Don't miss it.

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I usually say, "Hmm, your life is very reminiscent of a character in a novel I'm writing. Please tell me more."

Okay, I've never actually said this, but I keep meaning to. I have, if I like the person, listened for a bit and given advice on the order of, "Okay, that's the incident you should start the book with. I'll be happy to read your first draft." If I don't like them (or if I just want to get rid of a well-meaning but boring fool), I'll say something like, "No, you couldn't get an episode of a sitcom out of that." (Alternately, "You'd make a good guest on Jerry Springer when they run out of transsexual Nazis. When did you stop beating your wife?")