Should I Trunk My Idea?

Every Wednesday, YA Highway asks their readership a simple question to answer on your blog. Once you answer, you link your blog in the comments for other readers to hop on board. This is Road Trip Wednesday.

Today’s topic: What story ideas have you trunked because they were too similar to published/well-known stories?

I’m lucky to say that I haven’t trunked anything. Yet. That’s not saying I’ll never will, but so far I’ve been lucky.

Confession time: The Assassin Project could very easily fall into the trunked category, if I’m not careful. There were initially a lot of similarities between my story involving an academy of assassins and the Gallagher Girl series by Ally Carter. Because of this, I haven’t drafted Assassin Project. Instead, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on how to make my story different.

That’s what needs to be done when a story idea is too close to something that is out there. You have to see how you can make yours unique.

I forget who said it (and I might be misquoting horribly), but there’s only two types of stories: someone goes on a quest and a stranger comes to town. When you only have two ideas to go from, there will definitely be places where things overlap. The important thing is how you present it.

With that in mind, it’s exercise time. I’ll give you an opening sentence and you write a paragraph in the comments. The opening sentence is…

The doorbell buzzed seconds after minute.