I'm a writer, and so I have come up with... too many stories over my career as a writer. But, even when these stories fail, I usually hang onto them, so I can cannibalize ideas for later stories. So, even though I can't always write stories the way I originally planned them, they still will turn up on a page somewhere, somehow. Maybe that dumb protagonist idea can show up as a funny background character, maybe that thin "magic key" plot could be put into a larger story, where it doesn't outstay it's welcome & maybe that line of dialogue makes more sense from a villain character. So, I try to reuse & recycle ideas as much as I can...
But not always.
There are some stories - some concepts - that I come up with that I cannot write, and today I'm going to list them for you. There's various reasons why I can't write these. If you're a writer or storyteller of any stripe, and you're looking for ideas, feel free to use any of these as you wish, as I would be impressed by anyone that can write these stories. If I list a story here, it is because I cannot write it, but I would like to see it written - and for the sake of legal purposes, I want to formally state that I am not seeking any kind of trademark/copyright or monetary/intellectual property rights or any of that if you do happen to use these ideas. Whilst these are "my" ideas, they are just ideas, if you put the work in to actually write it, it's your story. All I'd ever want in return is, if asked, that you tell people where you got your idea or inspiration (i.e. from me) - nothing more.
With that out of the way, here are some story ideas which I tried, and failed, to write. (Note: most of the following titles are "working titles").
THE A.W.N.'S TOP 10 STORIES I CAN'T WRITE (10-6)
10. MONSTER
This idea is a bit weird, since it's part of an idea I don't want to talk about... okay, basically, I am working on a YA Horror novella series. I don't want to get into details, but basically it's set in Australia, and based around characters dealing with supernatural monsters. I liked the idea of the series, and using it to explore a lot of ideas, and one idea I liked is writing a full-length story, since I've only ever written short stories, and novella-length stories. So, I decided to have a special story, set in the same universe, but novel-length. I came up with this idea when I was younger, and the series was less lovecraftian, and I was intrigued by the term "monster". I wanted to develop what a monster was, in more ways than one. The idea of this story was about a kid whose mother died, and his father started dating a younger woman, and the kid is super angsty about it. Not long after, he discovers a strange egg which hatches to reveal a monster which he decides to hide from his family, but as the monster grows bigger and stronger, he starts to lose control of it. The basic idea was that this monster was actually a part of him, and a metaphor for his own anger, angst, hatred and feelings of inadequacy, so as he grows more stressed, the monster grows more dangerous. The story was meant to be all about this theme of the real monster being the anger within.
Unwritten because: It was a bad story. Full disclosure, this story was almost entirely inspired by "Beast" by Ally Kennen, a novel about a kid who takes care of a crocodile from a little egg, until it grows so big, it wants to eat him. I read the book, it was well-written, but I was annoyed that a story called "beast" wasn't actually about a beast. Like, I guess technically a crocodile is a beast, but I was imagining a grisly, fantastical monster, not something you can see at a zoo. But also, as a kid, I was aspirational towards those books written with drama and angst and intrigue, because it felt like that was "proper writing". As I grew up I realized, no, I still find that kind of thing boring, so wanting to write a story where a kid is angsty about dumb teen stuff, which develops into a monster, that's just kind of lame. Now, you might be saying "Great, you tell budding writers they can use these ideas, yet you present ideas that you think are crap. Do you genuinely want to see someone try to write this?" well, yes. Admittedly, there's a reason this is the lowest item on the list, but this idea has potential. Firstly, I'd think the kid's situation should be much more tragic, and the plot needs to be better developed. But more importantly, what inspires me is the title: "Monster". With a story called monster, it must be 'about' monsters, and that alone is pretty inspiring to me. What even is a monster? When I say 'monster' what do you picture? Is it a scaly creature with teeth, or is it a furry beast, or something else - feathers? Blubber? Is it small and ugly, or enormous and dangerous? Is it more human and intelligent, or more wild and animalistic? Is it new, young, perhaps a prototype, or is it old, ancient, perhaps mystical? Monster is a broad concept, yet it's particular, so much is and isn't a monster. I guess the real question is... what's a monster, to you?
09. URBAN SECTOR
The idea here was pretty simple. I like the idea of sitcoms, but I usually find it hard to engage with them for more than a few episodes, since they're living boring, ordinary lives - who cares when they resolve their personal drama, if it means we return to status quo? So I figured... if you set a sitcom in a sci-fi story, it would make it much more interesting. And I think living on a starship sounds fun, and this kind of gives the opportunity to play around with that. So, I had this idea for a trio of guys who live on a Starship that transports cargo between different human settlements around the solar system. I wrote the outline for the first episode that introduces Craig, a bit of a schlub (and alcoholic) who once helped design robots in a factory, but ironically lost his job (because robots took his job); so now he's a homeless drunk, and kind of pathetic (in a funny way). Then, there's Wax, an alien, who is homeless because he is an alien (actually half-alien, but doesn't like to talk about it), and faces a lot of covert discrimination, since Earth is quite xenophobic. I figured Wax stands up like a human, but looks like a mix between an axolotl and a squid, and he's blue; he doesn't have any weird powers, he just looks weird, but he's actually a regular guy. Then there's Luthor, the ship's navigator, and a gay man, and whilst he doesn't face any discrimination, he struggles to have a personal life since whenever their ship stops, they recieve their next destination and he has to spend all his time plotting their next course, and nobody else on the ship is gay or single, so he basically doesn't get any time to himself.
The idea for the pilot was that after introducing each character in a small vignette, explaining who they are, the starship docks on Earth, to unload cargo for several hours, so the rookie pilot goes planetside for some drinks to celebrate a successful first run; Craig finds the sucker, and convinces him to "party" with him (on the pilot's dime), and results in him drinking himself into a catatonic state; this delays the ship's plans, even after Luthor has plotted their new course, so he finally gets a chance to go planetside, where he meets Wax, and they eventually encounter the man that got their pilot drunk who becomes fast friends with Wax because, as a roboticist, he is used to interacting with non-humans, and whilst he doesn't approve of the means, Luthor appreciates that he got a chance to finally socialize with someone new. After some shenanigans and coincidences, Luthor has to go back onboard the ship, so he invites Craig and Wax to be his roommates.
Because Luthor basically doesn't work whilst the ship is in transit, it meant the story would mostly follow these three socializing, getting into drunken hijinks, dealing with prejudices with Wax, looking for love, and occasionally getting into sci-fi shenanigans due to the various anomalous or secret cargoes and passengers they have to transport.
Unwritten because: Well, a few reasons. Firstly, I originally planned this as an animation (back when I was unemployed), and I attempted to create this in Macromedia Flash... and I learned very quickly that single-handedly animating anything longer than 15 seconds is an absolute ball-ache. Also, as much as I like these characters and the concept, I am not a sitcom writer. I have come to realize that whilst I can enjoy reading character archs and interpersonal drama, I do not like writing it. I came up with some ideas for plots, like Luthor coming out of the closet to his new friends; Craig activating a robot that joins the cast; a fun romance with Luthor getting into a long-distance relationship with a guy that's scared of Wax; Craig trying to woo the ship's second-in-command & even some plot about a brewing alien war... but I just struggle to write stories that are entirely character-focussed. Characters should usually drive the plot, and I love writing dialogue where characters discuss the plot, but when the characters are the plot, I don't enjoy writing it (even when I enjoy watching it).
I am still very interested in writing science-fiction, so I haven't told you everything about this (there's a couple of plotlines and ideas I'll gladly cannibalize and Frankenstein into other stories, especially the alien war stuff) but at this point in time, I don't think I'll ever attempt anything remotely sit-com-like again.
08. CROOKED O'HARE
I love a good murder mystery, but they're surprisingly hard to find. Even though they were once incredibly popular, they seem to have vanished. So, I've been interested in writing a murder mystery for a long time. And I don't mean an occult detective or a crime story about a detective, I mean a proper Fairplay Mystery, where the reader can solve the puzzle alongside the detective. That's half the fun of a murder mystery. The other half is the detective themself, a character that is interesting, or has some key gimmick, that guides the story along. So, I had this idea of a detective called "Jack O'Hare", an whose gimmick was that he was a criminal. An Irish gangster who moved to New York in the early 1900s, after he gets framed for the murder of his own gang-leader, he's forced to solve the crime, and when he realizes the killer is his own best friend - meaning that he's going to be killed by the surviving members of his old gang - well it inspires Jack to go straight. So, the gimmick is, he's an ex-gangster, a ruffian and a thief, who spent most of his life being a criminal. So he knows how they think, he has connections in the underworld and now he's become a "good guy". I had this whole idea of him having a love interest - a Catholic, Hispanic girl - that did love him, but rejected him for his criminal, sinful ways; so, there would be this subplot about him trying to convince her that this isn't a scam or a con, he's actually going "legit". However, he does occasionally bend the rules to solve his crimes. Breaking and entering, roughing up suspects, stealing clues... that kind of thing, and he'd have an antagonistic relationship with a particularly by-the-book policeman. And I did have some plans for several stories in the series... about five. I had a closed-circle mystery set in a prison after that policeman caught him on trumped up charges of assault, when someone dies in a prison riot; a mystery where some drug addicted prostitute gets killed, so the police don't care enough to investigate; a mystery at a mansion where he arrived uninvited, and as an ex-con, people assume he's the killer, so again he has to clear his name... a few fun ideas. But, I never did write it...
Unwritten because: A few reasons. Firstly, 1900s? What the hell was I thinking?! I know almost nothing about the 1900s, I was just inspired because that's the classic "noir crime" era and several thinkpieces about "the decline of murder mystery" had convinced me that modern technology made murder mysteries harder to write... this is all nonsense by the way, modern technology doesn't change the murder mystery formula, unless you're a lazy writer and setting a story in a certain time period "for the vibe" is stupid. Now, I did try to revamp this story for a more modern era, something I could write without having to do a butt-tonne of research... but when I removed these characters from the early 1900s, their "classic" noir style washed off, and revealed them for the stereotypes they were. Irish gangster? Hot Catholic Hispanic floozy? By-the-book policeman with a moustache and a superiority complex? These weren't characters, they were caricatures. The real nail in the coffin? My inspiration, my gimmick, that made O'Hare feel so original? The idea that he was a "criminal-turned-detective"? Not only is that not original, it's the LEAST original detective concept in the world... one of the first ever icons of modern criminal investigation (and I'm talking in real life, not in fiction), who first profiled criminals, collected clues & started the whole concept of "detective work" was a man called Eugène-François Vidocq, a Frenchman who was a criminal-turned-criminalist from the 1800s. It turns out, after several years on the run, he witnessed a childhood friend of his César Herbaux, with whom he'd committed several crimes, being executed, and this inspired him to turn away from a life of crime - seriously?! Even my own character's turnaround was unoriginal! Vidocq had no other skills except committing crime, but he realized those skills could be used for good, to capture criminals. And it's not just art imitating life, but life inspiring art - Vidocq inspired several of the earliest "detectives" in fiction, including: Alexandre Dumas' "Monsieur Jackal"; Émile Gaboriau's "Monsieur Lecoq", who in turn inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes"; Edgar Allan Poe's "C. Auguste Dupin". So, in the end, I figured my story would require too much research; would take a lot of effort to polish up the stereotypes into three-dimensional characters & relied on an unoriginal premise.
Now, I've not given up on murder mysteries - far from it, I still have murder mystery story ideas I want to write - but, not with this detective, not this concept. I am not prepared to write a period piece, I don't find that kind of thing interesting, And if tried to adapt it to the modern era, I don't think I could do the story justice.
07. THE OTHER NEIGHBOURS
I still kind of like the title for this one... I might use it for something else. I even know the inspiration behind this one, because it's right there in the title... I live in the suburbs, and here everyone has neighbours, people whose homes are near theirs. But, if you're taking a stricter definition, a neighbour is someone next to you, meaning your neighbours are the ones you share a fence with. By this logic, most homes you should have three "neighbours". There's neighbouring homes to the left and the right, and one behind. I don't know if there's a special term for these, but I call them my "other neighbours", and the idea of this story was taking that concept to the extreme. See, I can talk to my left-and-right neighbours, if I want to know who they are, I can talk to them. But, if I want to know about my other neighbours, I'd need to put in more effort. And, I wanted to take the idea of "strangers in your neighbourhood" to the extreme.
So, this story was about a kid called Toby that became curious about his other neighbours. They had a tall mansion-like property, and the kid sees only one light on in their window at night, and hears strange bird-calls and jungle-like animal sounds. There's hedges all around, and he's never seen or heard a single person on the other side of the fence. So, one day, he pretends to throw his ball over the fence, to have a flimsy excuse to jump the fence and learn more about his neighbours. The story was about him encountering fantastical things on the other side of the fence. There would be a dog that was part-monster, and the size of a small car; a talking tropical bird called Clark; a cranky, old sleeping ghost; a squid trapped in a broken water heater; a room full of living instruments; a swarm of hyper-intelligent mice; a nature-spirit turned into a house-cleaner & a mischievous, talking monkey. I think it's a fun, quirky little story. I came up with the idea by designing the house first, and placing all of the weird neighbours all around it - the idea would be, the kid would meet the bird that would warn him about the dog, then he'd see the monkey, which would try to trick him into unlocking his cage by sending him to talk to the house-cleaner. So, then I tried writing the story, but when I got to a part where the kid could either go upstairs to the bedrooms, or downstairs to the basement, I didn't know which way to go. See, I was a young writer, and I had failed to give Toby a character, so he had no reason beyond 'the plot says so' to enter the house, let alone explore rooms. And it was then that I realized, I'd created a series of encounters inside rooms, most hidden behind doors, which often involve a young boy dealing with a magical puzzle, or encountering a creature sending him on a fetch quest - I'd accidentally written a videogame! So, hey, what if I turned this idea into a videogame.
Unwritten because: It turns out, videogames are supposed to be fun. I actually tried to create this game, twice, the first time was in Adventure Game Studio, a free "point-and-click" game maker and engine, but the coding was much too difficult for me to figure out, and I shelved the project, with dreams of one day finding someone who could create the game for me. Much later, I came across GameMaker Studio 2, a game creator tool which was much more intuitive to the non-coding mind. Now, this was a year or two ago, so I was much older; I adapted the story to add more horror elements, designed the levels - I even drew the whole first level, and created the character. But, after playing around with the character for a little bit, I realized... this game isn't fun. Sure, the story was more interesting, but a good videogame consists of gameplay, story and challenge. I had story, but there was no challenge: most of the puzzles I'd originally come up with were just fetch quests; and there was nothing good about the gameplay: walk around, talk to people and pick stuff up was kind of the start and end of the whole game. And because I had rewritten the story, the original plot (discovering that the swarm of mice was the wizard who originally owned the house, and bringing them back) was kind of lame, and I couldn't come up with a good reason why this whole thing had happened in the first place.
I still do like both concepts - I like the cutesy, "kid's book" feel of that original story, a kid encountering weird animals in a suburban home; and I also really like the horrific dark fantasy concept, with a teenager entering a cursed mansion. But, until I can learn how to make a videogame 'fun', I'm going to leave game creation to game creators. And whilst I'm still holding onto that setting and some of the characters and monsters from the horrific re-write of this story, I won't try rewriting The Other Neighbours for a third time (or would this be the fourth?). But damn, I still like that title... it still inspires cool ideas.
06. OTHERWORLD
This one is actually quite old, but the idea is very, very simple... geofiction. Also known as conworlding, geofiction is the basic idea of developing a real maps for fake places... "creating fictional geography", basically. See, a long while ago I created my own world, which I called Otherworld. The basic idea here was that I wanted to create stories which I was going to set on this artificial world I made. I was inspired by discworld's use of an alternate world to come up with interesting concepts and play with fun tropes, but instead of comedy and fantasy parody, I was interested in sci-fi homage and satire (I think... I'm not actually sure, but I wanted it to be kind of funny). The main intrigue of this planet was that there was a big hole in it, right through the poles, which affected sea, weather, culture and geography across the planet... in retrospect, that doesn't make any sense scientifically, since the world would probably have to collapse back into a spherical shape, but that was my idea, alright? I was young...
I had a series of stories based around the peculiarities of this world. The first story, with the working title "Weather Forecast" was originally set in Gorsenia, a country with crazy weather (because it was so close to the hole in the planet), so they developed the most advanced weather forcasting technology, only to realize it was so advanced, that by entering the right data, it could be used to predict the future. Another story, Firestorm, was about the king of Curland (a Pan-Asian Mishmash) leaving his throne to walk the country, and learn more about the lives of his citizenry, resulting in a political storm as several miscreants, both foreign and domestic, try to take advantage of the King's absence, only for a literal Firestorm to cause countrywide turmoil that only the king can resolve. There was another one about a scientist on the gothic, technologically advanced continent of Styriose creating artificial consciousness in a robot slave; and a story just called "The Hole Story" where several characters from Uranika (a cross between Eastern Europe and America) encounter the aliens responsible for blasting a hole in their planet... And there were several other ideas like different technology used to deal with the peculiar issues of each continent, and unusual terminology, since whilst these people basically spoke English, their cultural differences meant they used different words for some things.
Unwritten because: Honestly, it was too much work. I attempted to write the first chapter of the first story, set on Gorsenia, and since I was a young writer, I thought I'd start with my character waking up and going to work. But, even that scene was incredibly difficult, since I wanted him to be awoken by his alarm clock... but then I realized, would this world have alarm clocks? Also, how do they tell time? Does this world have a 24 hour day? And he's going to work, this must be a workday, but does this world have a weekend? Do they even have a 7 day week? I guess it depends on the time of year, but what kind of calendar does this world use? Would they base their seasons on the harvest, like many cultures have, or would they base them off some other yearly milestones. I did manage to come up with a 25-hour day, segmented into 5-hour quintants, skipping the whole calendar question, but even then, he got out of bed, and I realized... I had no idea what he would wear. I wanted to have weird creatures on this planet, not regular animals, so there weren't sheep, so what would their clothing be made of, if not wool and leather?
Okay, I'll worry about that later. So, he goes downstairs and eats breakfast... wait, what the hell would these people eat for breakfast? I just established that we don't have normal animals. Damn it!
I tried to skip ahead, and came up with some fun ideas, like there being subways to take people around the country, and a postman being this talented runner, since the terrible weather would make wheeled vehicles unreliable... but then I realized postmen wouldn't be the only people who couldn't use vehicles. How could a city work without vehicles... and wait, if it rained so much, wouldn't the trains also struggle due to the weather?
Basically, I realized that I'd walked into fractal writer's block, since any attempt to bypass a difficult section of research was just putting me face-to-face with another one. And if I tried to skip ahead, I'd just create problems that I'd either need to retcon, or ignore in the future.
This is not to say that geofiction, conworlding, or stories set on alien, fictional worlds are impossible, of course they're not. But, if I was going to create a story for one, it would need to be for a better reason than "drawing maps is fun", since I already drew the map and had fun, but when I tried to develop the world... I didn't. I'm not against doing something like this again, but I'd need to find some way to make the development much easier.
- - -
This blog post is getting a bit long, so I'm going to hit pause right here... but we'll continue this in tomorrow's post. I hope you're enjoying this, and let me know, do you have any story ideas that you've abandoned? You don't need to share them with the world like me, but since going through my old catalogue of Story Stuff, and finding my abandoned projects, I'm fascinated by the concept, so please let me know in the comments below.
I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and until next time, these are just a few of my abandoned ideas... and I'll see you tomorrow to share some more.
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