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.
