How do you shake a bad story idea?

I can’t get rid of this really crappy story idea.  I keep thinking up new plot twists and character details and I don’t want to.  It’s not even a genre I’ve written in before or ever planned on.  It’s science fiction.   I am not a science fiction fan at all.  I loved the Star Wars movies as a kid and occasionally, i’ll still like a science fiction movie, like Pitch Black, Fifth Element, or 12 Monkeys, but most of the time, it’s horrible.  Especially the books.  Bradbury is a wonderful author and at one time, I thought he was the best, but I don’t think his stuff was really science fiction.  There just isn’t a genre for what he writes, so they stuck that label on. 

To play word association, science fiction makes me think of words like redundant, played out, unoriginal, virgin…okay, just kidding about the last one.  After shamefully going to the Star Wars convention (which made me never refer to myself as a Star Wars fan again), I am well aware that there are plenty of space nerds that are female and are likely to be aroused by the size of a man’s lightsaber…no, literally a lightsaber, so science fiction fans are much more likely to lose their virginity than the stereotypes give them credit for.  Though I’d be willing to bet they’d call it “docking my starship” or “connecting to her USB port” or “engaging in the mating ritual”…something like that. 

Anyway, the few pieces of science fiction that I like do away with the cliches and formulas of science fiction, which most of the time have to do with intentionally going for weirdness, like “Oh, look how different these aliens are…the MEN have the babies!” type of stuff.  The big cliche is the rouge badboy starfighter that has a heart of gold under his sarcasm and rough exterior…and my story idea has that cliche.

It’s awful.  I have these played out plot details about the hunting down and exterminating of a predatory alien race that was discovered after a settlement of humans was already established on their planet.  Okay, I guess that makes them native, not alien, but you get the gist.  There is a special squad that patrols for these creatures,  of which my cliched character is the most effective yet problematic member.  You know the guy.  You’ve seen him in a thousand other movies.  The guy no one understands yet respects because of what he has been through.  The guy that just won’t conform.

And it just keeps growing in my head without an original detail to the story.  I have thought about it being a fish-out of-water story, having my rogue antihero awakened from suspended animation several years into the future, as he was top pilot of his time and trained on the prototypes of ships that it took years to actually put into the field.  Something horrible like that.  You know, the old being part of a military experiment that he comes to regret and resent plot line. 

I wrote a story…well, okay, I started a story that I never finished about these awful story ideas and how they invade what I consider decent story ideas.  It was about two college sophomores both majoring in creative writing who, after they both experienced awful freshman roommates, decided it would be best to room with each other.  Both agreed that it would be the only way to guarantee having a roommate that would respect writing and create an atmoshpere that supported the needs of a writer.  How it turned out though, was that their definition of that atmosphere was very different and there were two really horrible qualities in the roommate that kept the main character from being the productive writer he wanted to be.  It was really about the two problems with my own writing and how I get in my way of being the productive writer I want to be.

 The first quality the roommate and I share is the tendency to not see a story through.  The roommate, who was named Sam, would be all fired up about his story, talking about it and focusing on it and only it for several days, then never managing to put it on paper.  It drove the main character crazy, as Sam would share all the details with him and then, after invading the thoughts of his roommate, Sam would just leave him hanging, never finding out how the story ended up.  It was like watching 45 minutes of an hour long TV show time after time.   

I think I have at least 20 stories that I have started that are left in my unfinished short stories folder on my computer.  I think all of them are strong enough ideas to follow through with, some of them I already have mentally written the entire story.  I just get sidetracked and start a new story or revisit an old one, putting whatever i’m working on in limbo.  Some of these have been in that folder for four or five years. 

 The other one is the bad story idea.  While his roommate was working on serious ideas or trying to concrentrate on other things, good old Sammo would bombard him with these really awful story ideas, full of gimmicks and cliches.  I do this same thing to myself. 

My brain just won’t cooperate when I want to stop entertaining a story idea.  I want to move on, work on something I feel is worthwhile, I just can’t let the crappy one die.

What’s really awful, is this science fiction story is not a short story type of idea.  It just keeps getting longer and longer. 

So please, someone convince me to let this garbage die.  Laugh at me.  Make fun of me.  Something.  Let’s somehow put this turd to rest right here.

 Actually, that might be a good idea.  Maybe the humility it would take to put the garbage story ideas out there would be what it took to never go down that path again.

So, let’s try to put to rest some of the really horrible, completely shit ideas i’ve had, put to rest right here.  I’ll just lay them all out on the table and see if maybe the shame of letting them out allows me to leave them behind forever.  Some of them are single scenes of a story, some are just general concepts, some are dialogue, and some are plot aspects.  Some are bad because they are cliches.  Some are bad because they are so far-fetched.  Some are bad because they are just so damn stupid.  Some are from years ago, some are pretty fresh.  Some I put on paper, some I just let fester in my head.  So, in no particular order, the bad ideas are…

- People being trapped at a diner that somehow has become this place where nothing electrical will work anymore (where the hell did I think this Twilight Zone reject was going?).

 - A futuristic story about a guy figuring out that the computer system that connected and ran everything was fatally flawed committing suicide after being framed for creating that fatal flaw ( I promise I wrote this beauty before I’d ever heard of the internet…and yeah, I did actually write this one.  i’ll blame it on being 14 years old at the time…even though I was 18.  14 just sounds, I don’t know…less humiliating?).

- A Caucasian man discovering his grandfather wasn’t really his grandfather after being diagnosed with Sickle Cell Anemia.

 - A homicide detective and full-blooded Seminole tracks down a childhood friend, chocked full of Seminole traditions pulled from an encyclopedia and forced into the plot

- A story that started with the sentence I had died.  I have no clue where that idea could go, but I’m sure it wouldn’t go anywhere near “interesting.”

- A story about a guy selling his soul to the devil, which the devil keeps in a jar…yeah, a jar…in his room full of soul-jars in hell.  In return, the devil gives the guy all kinds of powers to help hunt down all the escaped souls from hell.  the guy, instead, uses his powers to free his own soul from hell and then spends eternity running from the devil and fighting off other super-powered minions.  Probably would be a pretty long book, it going on through eternity and all.  Man, was that one embarrassing to share.

- Another soul stealing story idea, inspired by the steaming turd of a story I just described, in which a man is approached by the devil and informed that the man’s father sold his son’s soul and the devil was going to collect in three days, taking the man to hell.  The story was all about how he would handle those three days.  Petty revenge and life regrets faced and dealt with.  Maybe I should have never read Legion, or Son of Rosemary.  Yeah, I’ll blame it on that.

- A story about bounty hunters.  The only thing I came up with was the detail of how the leader had a sawed-off shotgun chained to his belt so it was always ready for a quick draw.  I have no clue what to blame this little nugget on.

- A story about someone leaving an unsolvable math problem on the chalkboard and one night, the janitor…oh, wait.  That wasn’t my bad story idea.  Never mind.

- A football story about a guy who is always stuck with the dirty work assignments on plays finally getting his chance at glory. The bad thing about this story, other than it being another huge cliche, was the fact I wrote this as a teenager who didn’t know much about football.  The final play of the game would have been whistled for illegal man down field.  It was a pretty embarrassing moment when I let my free safety friend read it before anyone else and as soon as he finished, he pretended to blow a whistle, yelled out the call of illegal man down field, and started laughing.

 - A story for which, somehow…my money is on pity…I got an A on in my 9th grade journalism and writing class.  It was this really awful Vietnam war story called…oh, man, I can’t believe I’m admitting this…Scared Little Boys.  Mr. Grieve, if you’re reading this, please contact me and explain how you refrained from laughing in my face when I turned this in.  The incredibly awful climax of the story was our main character trying to steal a helicopter to get to somewhere he could make a clean break from the army and go off to live his life in hiding rather than to continue to face the horrors of war.  You know, something subtle like that would be sure to work.  Ehh, I killed him in the getaway anyway.

- Another war story written later that same year…a really long one…about a family in which someone from each generation had fought in every American war.  I guess you can imagine how hard I laughed years later when I saw Forrest Gump and Forrest explained about Lt. Dan’s family history.  That 30 second scene totally summed up my craptastic war epic.  I still laugh when I see that scene. 

 - A story, actually a novel, about a guy who worked in a psych facility discovering that some of the patients were in the middle of this battle between good and evil, but he can never sort out what is truth and what is delusion when the patients share the details of their struggles.  Yeah, thank goodness for that tendency to not follow through with some stories, huh?  I let this one peter out after 50 or 60 pages.  Wow, that’s a lot of wasted time. 

I’m sure there have been plenty more, but for now, that’s all I can remember, mercifully.  It really is ugly to see them spelled out there in front of me. I hope the humiliation of sharing this is incentive enough to steer me away from entertaining those bad story ideas.  I’m sure more will pop up.  I don’t really have a problem with that.  I just really want to stop feeding them and helping them grow. 

The First Rejection

I knew as soon as I picked up the envelope. Too thin, too light. No way it contained anything like a letter explaining the next step of the process and when to expect to see the published story or, oh, I don’t know, a check? I could see there was only a little rectangle of yellow paper inside, about 2 inches by 3 inches. I was pretty sure all that could fit on such a small piece of paper was “NO.”

I was close. It was from the Georgia Review. It wasn’t even a letter, just a photocopied note that thank me for considering them but my work didn’t fit their needs. Good luck, unspecified writer!

I still have that piece of paper, along with all the other rejection notices. I don’t know the total count off the top of my head, but it’s a long way from that awful “First 100 submissions” I keep hearing about.

I keep them all just to remind me that I still have a lot of work to do and I can’t let “No thanks” be the last thing I hear about my writing. Also, it helps me keep track of who to send junk to when I get to that phase of my career that Vonnegut went through when he knew he was so well received he could write trash and it would be widely accepted and praised. I mean, that’s likely, right?

That first one stands out to me because I wasn’t as ready as I thought I was to hear no. I’d imagined a lot of different responses from the Georgia Review, some good, some bad, but none of them were as complete of a blow off as what I’d received. I’d done what everyone does with the unknown, filled it in what assumptions and guesses. I’d assumed that I’d get some comments about my story and guessed there might be a critique of my work. Now that I know how extremely rare it is to get any personal response, it’s not quite the shock it was to get some generic rejection that doesn’t even conform that anyone had even lifted the coverpage.

The story was called Sideshow. It’s a story I wrote all in one sitting in one of those rare times the words just seem to keep stringing themselves together without any effort from me. If writing was always like that, I’d be a complete junkie. I’d be like I was with video games when I was in middle school, pretending to have thrown up so I could get a little bit closer to rescuing Zelda and running on two or three hours of sleep because I was just so close to figuring out how to beat Super Machoman and finally get that bout with Tyson.

As great as that “zone” as I’ve heard other writers refer to it is, it incredibly rare and completely unpredictable. It’s such a rare thing that the few times it’s happened, I’ve thought it just might be the last time I was fortunate enough to experience it. 

Alright, so that first one is out of the way.  It was a good experience, looking back.  No, seriously.  I’m not just trying to convince myself that getting shot down on the first try was wonderful.  That part of it still sucks.  I mean it was a good experience in that I now know what to expect and I don’t have to rely just on my imagination to conjure up the reaction of editors.  There’s not the anxiety that comes with the complete unknown. 

The “Important Characters”

The titled I picked for this page probably has a fairly universal response of “huh?”  That is, except for the select few people that have read the stories that I’m presently shopping around. Anyone who has sent his writing in to get published would probably agree that it is extremely difficult to sum up the gist of your story in a neat little paragraph well enough to make an editor take notice.  I temporary become obsessive compulsive or neurotic or something when I try to write a submission letter, writing and rewriting that descriptive paragraph and thinking every time That sucks.  It doesn’t even sound like the story I wrote.  I probably have written 10 to 20 versions of each letter I’ve sent.  I kind of wish I could talk myself into being that intense in editing and rewriting the actual story.   I mention this because I know I won’t be able to explain these characters very well without the whole story to support them.  I’ll try anyway. 

 

The characters I mentioned in the page’s title aren’t the full list of my characters or anything, just the ones that stand out as most memorable to me.  They are also featured in the stories I have shopped around the most.  

The man and the dog are both from a story I wrote called Nick.  Nick’s the dog…kind of.  It’s really just the name the main character has mentally assigned this dog that lives in his neighborhood.  He has perceived a bond with this animal that he has never really met, only driven past.   Why it’s important to him is that it’s the only consistent thing in his life.  He starts and ends every day with greeting the dog from his car.  See, doesn’t make much sense in a summary.   

The Bathroom Graffiti refers to my story Stance.  In this story, political statements penned on a bathroom stall lead the main character to self-realizations.  Is used almost all actual graffiti I’d seen, mostly in the same bathroom at a local Laundromat.   This one is actually is easy to sum up, just difficult to make sound interesting.   

This visor is somewhat challenging to explain.  I witnessed a guy at a Goodwill thrift store beg for money, offer to sell his personal items, and almost get into a fight, all over wanting to buy a 49 cent visor…a 49 cent purple women’s visor.  He spent about 30 not-so-sane minutes in the store and I followed him around to see what crazy thing he’d do next.  I was obsessed with figuring out why that visor would be so important, so I filled in the blanks and wrote the story.  No big surprise that I call it 49 Cents.   This one is my favorite of my stories and the one I think has the best chance of being published.  I’m kind of alone in this opinion, though, as the people close to me all point out the ones they think have a better chance.  Hell, I just want one of us to be right.  I don’t care which one.

Good and bad life advice taken from the pages of NES instruction manuals

Good Advice

 As you skate around the Main Park, watch out for cars tearing through the streets, tough-looking thugs, motorcycle maniacs, and Frisbee-throwing freaks.

 A Fat Man is as bad as his belly is big. He'll put the squeeze on your vitality if he gets his hands on you.

 The Leather Shield is not much use against bullets or fire attacks

 Oil; once you run over it, your car will slide.

 The higher the number of your virus level, the more viruses you start with.

 Avoid going through the mud.

 Sharing food with all members of your party helps everyone stay healthy

 When you return to town, or journey to new ones, you should go shopping.

 If you are adjacent to two or more enemy monsters, you should review the strength of each before deciding which one you should fight.

 Dodge opponent's punches and then punch back immediately.  You'll startle your opponent (his face will show it).  This is your chance -- punch furiously

 Watch out for poisonous snakes in the underground shelter

 Be advised to keep an eye out for weapons, ropes and life sustaining pizza pies as you go.

 Fend off the boomerang with the shield.

 You loose a life if you fall down waterfalls.

 You will find some enemies more vulnerable to certain weapons than others.

 A Master Ninja’s hands and feet are deadly weapons.

 Finding the Boss’s key weakness is the key to defeating him and a Boss will always have a weakness.  None are invincible.

Bad advice

Defeat all your opponents, and challenge Mike Tyson in the Dream Fight!

If you want to know what lies beyond a ledge on Earth, simply toss a jellybean in the unknown direction

Some of your enemies will be carrying guns. Kill them and you can pick up the gun they leave behind

Whenever you are low on energy, look for energy pills to eat

The triple rock is the ultimate weapon

The Boss may seem human, but don’t be fooled

Make sure you kill any military officers you happen to come across 

Follow-up songs to Checch and Chong’s Basketball Jones

Jai Ali DT’s

Shuffleboard Munchies

Chutes and Ladders Physical Dependence

Boggle Recreational Use

Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Rehab

Four-Square Withdrawal

Duck Duck Goose Cold Turkey

Hockey Tolerance

Presidential Physical Fitness Challenge Overdose

Pac-Man Fever

Rebuttal to the Wishes Expressed in the Song If I Had a Hammer by Someone Who Does, In Fact, Have a Hammer

I have to say I feel you are grossly overestimating the impact hammer ownership would have on your life. 

Let me elaborate.

First of all, I can appreciate your enthusiasm, but let me tell you, using a hammer isn’t as enthralling as you may believe.  If you start off hammering in the morning, no matter your level of excitement or motivation, you are not going to feel like hammering by the time evening rolls around and most certainly, you will not feel like doing so all over this land.  That’s bad for your elbow anyway. 

Secondly, the amount of danger one can hammer out is fairly limited.  You can make sure there are not brads or nails sticking up in doorways so people don’t snag their socks and you can decrease the likelihood of wall hangings falling on passerbys.  You might be able to ward off a dog attack if the dog is small, old, or lazy.  I’d say it might help in a mugging scenario, but rethinking that, it’d probably just get you shot.   

Most importantly though, a hammer is not a good communication device.  If you have a warning to deliver to someone, please use a more effective tool for delivering said warning.  If you were to email, phone, or fax a warning to someone, chances are they will clearly understand the cause for your concern and be able to more effectively develop a plan to avoid the dangers they were being warned of.  If you use a hammer to do this, the best response I can foresee is “Hey, what’s that hammering sound?”  Not the response that could help one avoid a flash flood or hurricane.   

And as far as Hammering out love between all your brothers and sisters, I’d suggest you turn to family counseling or maybe just some quality time.  Threats are not going to force anyone to love anyone.   

I am not trying to take away any credit from the hammer.  I hate to imagine how much longer the home improvement projects I have been working on would have taken without the use of this tool.  It’s design is perhaps genius in that all your nail needs are addressed in one-hand held device.  Need to put one into something, there you go.  Need to pull one out of something, turn that bad boy around and you’re halfway there.  Also, if you hit a BB with a hammer, it gets really hot. That is science in action, so that is cool. 

All I am trying to say here is that while some aspects of life have been greatly improved by the hammer, I feel you are neglecting several key life areas and expecting a hammer to magically intervene and whisk your problems away.  That’s unrealistic and unhealthy.   

Sincerely,

Sean Hewlett

Hammer Owner 

Original Versions of Famous Film Lines Less Inspired Than The Final Revisions

“Frankly Scarlet, you’re going to have to repeat that. I spaced for a second.”
 
“Soylent Green is salty!”
 
“I’m out of order? I’m out of order?! Well, I apologize, then.”
 
“To Infinity and…geez, there’s really nothing left after infinity.”
 
“As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a Pep Boy.”
 
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why did mine always draw in the fat chicks?”
 
“The first rule of Fight club is…no purple nurples.”
 
“I’m going to make him an offer he’ll seriously have to mull over.”
 
“Go ahead, Punk, why would I care?”
 
“Tell ‘em to go out there with all they got and cover the point spread for the Gipper.”