What's the right platform for your best idea?
Spin the We Are All Creatives format wheel to work out how to execute your ideas
I’m writing a book about a society wedding so I’m casting around for venues.
This is the best part of the job. The imagineering. Laying the building blocks for the fictitious world you are about to create - making mood boards, going on research trips and coming up with characters names.
(I need to work on this latter bit. I had a meeting with a TV production company yesterday and talking about two of the characters - Serena Balcon and Jonathon Balon - made me realise that I need to mix it up a bit!)
The idea of having the wedding in a chateau led me down an internet rabbit-hole to Dick and Angel Strawbridge’s lifestyle empire. You might know Dick and Angel Strawbridge from their TV show Escape to the Chateau, which recently ended after nine seasons.
The idea of moving somewhere new and documenting it, isn’t new. In 1985 advertising executive Peter Mayle relocated to the South of France and then wrote about it. A Year in Provence - sold to Hamish Hamilton for £5000 - became a best-selling book and subsequent BBC mini-series which inspired thousands of middle-aged couples to retire to the French countryside.
But if Mayle kicked off the relocation media trend it’s nothing compared to the Strawbridges who have taken the idea of moving to France and turned it into a vast lifestyle and entertainment empire.
As well as their Escape to the Chateau TV series, the Strawbridges have got books, a podcast and an online magazine which will give you the recipe for Negronis made with their own Chateau gin. You can hire their house for a wedding or a milestone birthday blow-out. There’s a whole range of merch including chateau cushions, bed-sets and notebooks. This year they are even going on a 30 date tour the length and breadth of the UK.
From this…
To this…. (photos from Escape to the Chateau)
You could argue that all the various spokes of the Escape to the Chateau lifestyle empire spin off the TV series, but here’s the thing. Their starting point could have been books. Or the brand of gin or even the Chateau jigsaw. That central idea of ‘Chateau Life’ is the gateway to lots of different things.
Strong central ideas are like a big ball of putty - they can be shaped in lots of different ways if the basic premise is good enough.
Marie Kondo started out as an organising consultant and then got a book deal to write about her decluttering philosophy and tidying techniques. The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up became a global bestseller and now she has a range of minimalist kitchenware and organisers, tidying courses, cleaning products, a Netflix Show as well as the KonMari consultants programme, which trains people up as Kondo certified organisers.
Autopsy technician and avid reader Alaina Urquhart took her expertise and interest in true crime and turned it into a hit podcast Morbid, rather than a book. (Although that came later - her serial killer thriller The Butcher and the Wren apparently got 40,000 pre-orders from one push on Morbid’s social channels.)
Eve Rodsky turned her thoughts about ‘split-responsibility’ parenting into a self-help manual Fair Play, a documentary and a card-game aimed at prompting your other half to share the load.
And who knows what Meghan Markle has in mind for American Orchard Riviera but you can guess it is going to be expansive.
But if ideas can shape-shift across fiction, retail and services the question is, where to start? What’s the right springboard for your best idea? Which platform is going to give it the best chance of taking flight? Crucially, what are you going to enjoy the most?
I’ve been giving this a lot of thought over the past few weeks as I’ve been revisiting old book ideas stored in the many folders on my desktop.
There are hundreds of ideas on dozens of different ‘ideas’ documents. I like them all, but they are still dormant.
And here’s the truth. Most of them will never get turned into books. For me, a 100,000 word novel can take between five to twelve months to write even working on it full-time and even novellas can take several weeks. I know a handful of authors who’ve written over a hundred books (Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts have both penned over two hundred novels,) but most authors don’t even reach a dozen.
But then it struck me - not every idea has to become a book.
The comedy idea based on my dual-heritage upbringing could be a one-woman show at Edinburgh.
My war-time saga could become a scripted audio drama.
That historical non-fiction book could be a mini-documentary I put out on Youtube or a podcast.
A pithy little idea could be a short story. A thought I’ve been chewing over could be an essay. The start of a collection of essays if I liked writing it.
As for my recent novel The Singles Table, I’ve got a half formed idea to turn it into a dating app.
So if you’re not really getting anywhere with a great idea, think about if you’ve chosen the right form to bring it to life.