“Is This a Good Idea?”

Yes, it is. There are no bad ideas (if by bad you mean “not worth pursuing, because no one has any interest in it.”)

What matters is not your idea or subject but how you handle it. How you present it. What examples you use. The slant you take on it. And, most important, the connections you find and show between your subject and the reader. The “interest” is not in your subject, since nothing is in itself boring or interesting. What then?

We have interest in what we can see connected to ourselves, our goals, our curiosity, our needs. Do you care about the jack in the next guy’s auto trunk? Probably not . . . until you have a flat tire and no jack. Then every car going by you becomes extremely interesting. Everything is like that; interesting once you see the connection to yourself and your world.

The writer’s challenge (about this anyway) is not to find a hot topic that people want to read about, which is a moving target and changes moment to moment. Your challenge is to plumb the depths of something, anything, and tease out of it what makes it fresh or different or related to the concerns or nature of a target reader.

There’s nothing you can think of, (or anyway nothing EYE can think of) that a creative person cannot re-frame or recast into something compelling. Try it. Think of something that no one can make compelling. Whatever you come up with that you say is boring or not worth doing, I can show you how to find a slant that, to me at least, makes it worth learning and sharing with readers who are not brain dulled.

Raymond Chandler, the great writer of hard-boiled detective novels, wrote in his essay, The Simple Art of Murder: “Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality. There are no dull subjects, only dull minds.”

If you have a sharp mind and can handle the language, you can write things people want to read.