We didn't have an agent - at least not someone who'd ever agented before (more on bad agents in a later post). We submitted our story with the wrong typeface, the wrong leading, and wrong font size. We even had the temerity to keep one of the most respected and famous editors in the business waiting (again, see upcoming blog: bad agent). We didn't purposely not follow the rules it's just that we were idiots. We hadn't bothered reading them because we'd never thought for a moment there were any that mattered. Just write, tighten and send, right? Really, we were that naive.

But the one thing we did do right - barring all the typos, screwing up all the POV's (general rule we didn't know: only one POV per scene, please), and everything else about that first submitted manuscript that marked us as newbies - the one thing we got right was the idea. At the risk of boring you I humbly submit Philip K. Dick's trenchant opinion as to what makes an idea stand out - specifically with regards to science fiction - but certainly applicable across the board:

*** Science fiction is "not merely a story set in the future, and it not merely a story featuring high technology…It entails a “fictitious world” that “comes out of our world, the one we know: This world must be different from the given one in at least one way... sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society…There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation…so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition.” In “good science fiction, the conceptual dislocation—the new idea, in other words—must ...be intellectually stimulating to the reader…[so] it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification–ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create.” (Philip K. Dick, Letter, 1981, Reader, 41-42, xiii-xiv) ***

My brother and I may not have known much about the minutiae when we started writing The Unincorporated Man (and it certainly would've been easy to get lost there) but we instinctively knew that we'd better damn well do more than create cool or fantastical characters and place them into a cool or fantastical world. Every SF editor in NYC has a stack of unread manuscripts on their desk with WELL WRITTEN - BEAUTIFULLY DESCRIBED worlds but a dearth of raisons d'etre for those worlds.

It's a tall order but it's not magic. Ask yourself: is what you're creating enabling your reader to create too? If all it is is your own imaginary world described than perhaps it needs something more. What that "more" is I couldn't say. What I can say is this - get that one thing right and feel free to screw the rest up to your heart's content (don't tell my editor I said that). Because by piquing the editor's curiosity you'll have accomplished something extraordinary : you'll have set off the "chain reaction of ramification ideas" that will separate your story from the rest. You'll have accomplished the one right thing and I can promise you this: it won't be a long wait from there.