All of us at some point have written a story with a concept that just won't work. However, it's usually not until after we start writing that we figure out our idea is flawed. A few weeks ago, I looked back at some of the stuff I thought I could turn into a story, and laughed. So, what's the worst concept you thought you could turn into a story?
Every concept can be turned into a story. All it takes is a bit of imagination. However, I am curious to know which concepts of yours are so laughable.
The dream i just had. It made very little sense and there's was no conflict. I guess i say that cause i only remember 4 parts of it...
I agree with Joker. I have had story ideas that I lost enthusiasm for, and a few that I haven't figured out yet how to turn them into stories.
Well, the one that stands out is the story I wrote at about 13 where the US vice president hires a group of Mexican terrorists and plans, then stages a violent coup nearly overthrowing the entire American government...only to be stopped by a no-name journalist. That just didn't make any sense.
I'm trying to think... I can't think of anything too completely terrible. I tried my hand at murder mysteries, twice, when I fancied myself as a 15-year old version of a modern Agatha Christie. I'm sure some of those attempts were a little all over the place... and never finished, I might add.
haha, My current novel-project keep needing severe rewriting to make sense, since it is based on a lifetime of daydreams and full of cliches and sillyness, lol. But in its basics I think it's a really cute story and I really wanna make it work, so I'll dedicate all this work to hopefully make it salable, because I hope others will enjoy it like I do. It's not easy though, to make sense of daydreams, but the theme is there and will come through some way or another. I keep changing details to make it less silly and more plausible, hoping for it to finally turn out the way I want it.
I am not sure it's terrible. Just not very logical. I never actually dropped the project. Instead it's a twisted rabbit hole of a bunch of crazeh crap I can think of on a daily basis. Well: It starts out like an ordinary zombie novel. An outbreak of a virus. Zombies running amok. However, the key difference is these aren't people zombies. These are computer zombies. Space and time is being rewritten and the computers have a super virus that has given them emotion. So computers in this sense were dead and then given life to dominate the world. There is space travel, zombie computers, holograms, murder, mystery, and a whole lot of what was I smoking last night. [Nothing, btw]
I got stuck on my novel for a while, and started writing stupid stories on the side. They're all short or unfinished stories that lost my interest. One was about a woman whose husband died in a fiery accident, and she bought a dummy and dressed him in her husband's clothes and pretends it's the husband. It's written from the son's perspective who is forced to interact with it, talk to it at the dinner table, etc. I wrote a story as a kid about a little girl who runs away from home and walks onto the freeway and climbs a light post and hangs a hammock from the light to the pole. She lives over the freeway and hunts animals in the forest.
None recently, but when I was around nine or ten, I wrote a story about these girls that got stuck on a broken gondola, then got chased around by a man who was orange because he'd eaten too many carrots. I don't remember much else, except the "twist" was that they were transporting stolen diamonds inside carrots.
If you developed tat story more that would be soo awesome. The concept itself sounds funny, you should give it a try.
I was in the 8th grade and I had to write a short story. Everything up until the ending was pretty good. I mean the prose were probably bad but the story seemed good. Anyways it was about a teen girl who starts talking to this guy online. They decide to meet and it turns out that this teen guy she has been talking to was only used to convince the MC that he really was a teen. So they meet and the two of them have some fun at the park and eventually she learns that it was all a lie. This hidden guy in this car shoots the teen and kidnapps the girl. It also turns out that the narrator was actually the pedophile. Now I am not sure how that made any sense and I don't quite know why I had him kill the boy off. Because he is a witness? Because the man felt like it? Because I thought 'Hey I might aswell throw in a murder because I already imply the MC is going to be raped' Not exactly what this topic was about but it was just one thing that has always bugged me. Why the hell did the boy get killed? Oh and then there was another short story for school. In all honesty I dont even remember the plot. I do remember that I had used a MMORPG as the setting and that I used my character and a friends character in it. I knew it had something to do with Cinnamon Twists(because they were the best food for hunger at the time) and something to do with the King. But I think it was complete garbage and I honestly don't remember anything really beyond that. I sorta wish I had saved a copy of these two short stories. Especially the first one.
I had this alien story I tried very hard to write for a long time. My complete lack of knowledge and interest in space doomed that story from the start. Which is a shame, because I think it could have been good if someone else wrote it.
I got this idea from a dream: Zombies had taken over the world, and the last three living humans were shacked up in the desert somewhere avoiding Zombies and trying to stay alive. The group consisted of one guy, his girlfriend, and her female friend. The guy and his girlfriend were trying to convince the other girl to get pregnant and help re-populate the world, but she refused because she couldn't stand the guy--he was obnoxious and gross. The story consisted of arguments. Which is worse, letting humanity die off, or repopulating it with the sperm of an obnoxious idiot? I like the idea about the girl with the hammock above the freeway, who hunts animals in the forest to stay alive. She sounds like an interesting character.
I had this idea a long time ago. This 16 year old girl is alone at home and it's raining cats and dogs out. When this boy comes stumbling in half dead from hypothermia. He turns out to be this super genitically engineered human and they are hypersensitive to cold. He had escaped from the lab he was made in and the people from the lab are after him so she takes him in and they fall in love even though being with him places her in danger. In case you haven't guessed I got the idea from the tv show Dark Angel.
@joanna-The first one seems like Angeline Fowl from Artemis Fowl, before Holly made her better. I'm sure someone could make it into a good story. The second one is interesting. I think it would be better if the girl started preying on motorists... ooh, a cannibal girl!
The first idea reminds me of the film 'Lars and the Real Girl' about a lonely man who buys an internet sex doll, and the whole family have to treat her like one of the family and push her around in a wheelchair - take her to church etc. This is an amazing film btw and not sordid, but actually a really sweet tale.
My girlfriend had a dream where she was in hell, and everyone in hell was trapped inside a levitating, maybe 4 foot by 4 foot transparent box. I wanted to make this into a story, and I haven't yet. With some imagination I think I can make it more interesting than just people in a box.
When I was in the second grade I wrote a story about a sentient square. The big plot twist was that the square turned out to be a circle all along.
When in high school I was reading a lot of Danielle Steel. Apparently I thought I could write just like her. I started writing a story (actually got 20 pages written while ignoring the teacher in math class! lol) called "Jade" about a beautiful 20 something woman who was the daughter of a wealthy oil baron. Now, it went nowhere simply because at 15, I had NO idea what a 20 something woman actually thought, or what life as an adult was like. It was a good attempt at "drama" but looking back it's laughable. Although now I wonder if it should be risen from the ashes for another crack as Ms. Steel's crown..... lol
Ever seen Lars and the Real Girl? The concept is very similar and was made into a movie (scoring 7.5 on IMDB). Consider how awesome this would be for a kid's book. The wackier the better, these days, and kids have a whole different set of logics than us. As for the OP's story concept -- consider someone like Terry Prachett writing that? It would be an awesome read, and in his style, make perfect sense. I guess my point here is the same as the Joker's (only made more labourously), that any idea in the right hands can be made into something great.
Some of my story ideas are too controversial, in my mind. Like a story idea I had about a Hitler Youth guy who befriends a minority girl and slowly but surely decides that Hitler's ideals are wrong and escapes Germany with the girl with Hitler's spies hot on his heels. (That and I think Nazis have been done to death. I could do a Soviet one though...) I'll let someone else write something like this. Others were plain wacky, like the little series I had in my head whem I was in high school about a group of flying ninjas with katanas. The protagonist was named Mohawk and his son was a 12-year-old blind Ninja neophyte named Daniel who was learning the arts of the Ninja. Mohawk's brother was Mojack and their buddies were Isadore, Ishim, Della, and a few others that I can't remember. Good lord, if they weren't constantly saving the Earth, they were participating in Ninja tournaments around the globe. Kinda like our Olympics, but with Ninjas. Oh, and it was set in our Earth, so the ninjas were from different countries. It's...complicated. Basically, there'd be American ninjas, British ninjas, French ninjas...yah. Each country had their own Ninja temple where their ninjas would protect that country (though nothing stopped them from visitng other countries and helping that country's ninjas with problems. In one story, my ninjas visit the American Grand Canyon where they aid the American ninjas in stopping this demonic creature that came out of there). Of course, if the world at large was in immediate, mortal peril, that none of the world's militaries could handle, all the ninjas would band together and stop the threat. The ninjas I was writing about were a small band of ninjas from Inverness, Scotland. I also wanted to write a series about an immortal gecko (who pretty much looks like the Geico gekco) who visits historical people and places. He dines with Ramses II, has a ballad with Elizabeth Tudor, chills out with Jefferson, has a mystery aboard a British ocean liner circa 1910 with his German companion, etc. No one would be batting an eye at the fact that they're talking to a small gecko who has a Pack of Unlimited Space (c) that he carries with him. Not only that, but he's DRESSED in that period clothing. When I posted that idea in another forum, someone suggested just having a random kid of the book's time setting be the narrator so that kinda killed it. :/ What made it special was the idea of a talking gecko, not some random kid.
Oh, ideas. Plenty of those to go around, hmm? I had one where an orphan girl could talk to animals. Sound normal so far? Well, no. The girl talked to a black cat, who was a witch cat with potions and spells, and the cat told her that she was "the chosen one." So the girl had to bring a bunch of animals on a boat to get to this island where the animals would be all happy and not hunted by people. How did she talk to animals, why was the weird cat a witch? I don't know, nothing makes sense. Oh yeah, and there were bad guys trying to stop the girl from gettinh on the boat, I've got no reason why.
