Why Coming Up With A New Book Idea Is Like The Fairy Tale – The Frog Prince – For Writers #Writers 🐸📚

Do you recall reading the fairy tale, The Frog Prince, when you were younger?

It is a fairy tale by the Brother Grimm. The tale focuses on a princess who kisses a frog and to her amazement it turns into a handsome prince.

Well, hold that thought there for a bit.

Being a writer is not easy. I think I say this on every blog post. One aspect which proves to be a constant challenge is coming up with new ideas for books or stories.

If only Amazon sold ‘New Idea’ tree seeds which we could order, plant and grow. Then we could happily harvest our new ideas for our creative projects and never throw a hissy fit again about ‘getting nothing’ from our weary writer brains.

As new ideas for future novels sadly don’t grow on trees we have to come up with them…ourselves. Ugh.

This is tricky because coming up with new ideas for future best selling books can take weeks, months, years and even decades. In addition not all new ideas ping into our writer brains fully formed. A lot of the time it’s like putting flat packed furniture together and not all new ideas come with assembly instructions. You have to spend hours, days, weeks etc, carefully putting them all together to see if they will work. Even then there is no guarantee the idea will be a success.

Also, a lot of ideas fail for a number of reasons. They are slippery little things. some don’t work, some make you cringe, some annoy you after the first three chapters and some make you lose interest in them after 30,000 words.

To be successful you have to keep coming up with ideas and be able to accept that some won’t work.

So, let’s return to the Frog Prince fairytale. A funny maxim has been constructed on the tale of the princess kissing the frog.

‘Before you meet the handsome prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs.’

I have done a bit of research and the maxim originated from a needlepoint pattern advertising campaign in the 70s.

In my analogy for this post:

The princess is the writer and she has to kiss a lot of frogs (new ideas) before she meets her handsome prince (the idea which forms the writer’s next book). Ha ha ha!

Coming up with ideas is very similar to kissing wet, slippery frogs

Some of us have to kiss a LOT of frogs too!

Happy Frog Kissing Writers!