I am in the habit of...

Writing down each and every story idea I have (for Lit or otherwise), and then revisiting it at a later date to consider it's viability.

Is this a good story? Is it phenomenally stupid? If it's a good idea, am I the one who should be writing it?

I've taken to pitching story ideas to myself, trying to sell it, as if I was sitting on one side of a desk, looking skeptical, while Enthusiastic Writer Me tries to plug it.

I've managed to discard several pants-on-head retarded storylines this way, often mentioning them to friends to see if maybe they can make something of it. If it sounds stupid to you, it'll sound stupid to everyone else.

Then I remember that someone once walked into a producer's office and said "Okay, picture this... an old, washed up Elvis, living in a retirement home in Texas, alongside a black JFK, fights an Egyptian mummy..."

And I'll be damned if that didn't turn out to be an amazing movie.

I wonder if any of those stupid storylines I threw away or gave to friends have ever turned into something brilliant?

#missedopportunities

What are some dumb ideas you've considered and then thrown away? And no, I'm not trying to filch your ideas...

BiscuitHammer said:

Writing down each and every story idea I have (for Lit or otherwise), and then revisiting it at a later date to consider it's viability.

Is this a good story? Is it phenomenally stupid? If it's a good idea, am I the one who should be writing it?

I've taken to pitching story ideas to myself, trying to sell it, as if I was sitting on one side of a desk, looking skeptical, while Enthusiastic Writer Me tries to plug it.

I've managed to discard several pants-on-head retarded storylines this way, often mentioning them to friends to see if maybe they can make something of it. If it sounds stupid to you, it'll sound stupid to everyone else.

Then I remember that someone once walked into a producer's office and said "Okay, picture this... an old, washed up Elvis, living in a retirement home in Texas, alongside a black JFK, fights an Egyptian mummy..."

And I'll be damned if that didn't turn out to be an amazing movie.

I wonder if any of those stupid storylines I threw away or gave to friends have ever turned into something brilliant?

#missedopportunities

What are some dumb ideas you've considered and then thrown away? And no, I'm not trying to filch your ideas...

Click to expand...

I write them down, but I don't throw any of them away. I've got folders full of partly completed ideas and half-finished novels that got interrupted by life, and weren't good enough to commit to finishing.

I've got over a dozen stories/projects I've started work on, that range from 700 words (arguably the worst idea of the lot, about a guy who offers his roommate up for casual sex on Craig's List to get back at him for... something. Any excuse, really), through to 9000 words on something I know won't do well on Lit, but that I'll write anyway, that's an extension of my Jesse & Will universe.

All of them are 'dumb' ideas if I'm honest, but they'll keep me amused while I write them.

BiscuitHammer said:

What are some dumb ideas you've considered and then thrown away? And no, I'm not trying to filch your ideas...

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I have to confess I've never thrown anything away - I've got stories going back to when I was at high school and I've even rewritten a couple of those. I have a list of ideas, thoughts, songs, one liners and concepts for stories and I just add whenever an idea pops up. Images as well. I keep those on Pinterest in a folder called random writing ideas.

Many of my stories are plagued by false starts. During self-edits, I end up rewriting entire sequences or plot threads. Instead of completely discarding these false starts, I put them into an "outtakes" file and go over them at a later date. Some of these have ended up as springboards for other stories, others have died.

Dumb ideas? Just a matter of perspective.

ChloeTzang said:

I have to confess I've never thrown anything away - I've got stories going back to when I was at high school and I've even rewritten a couple of those. I have a list of ideas, thoughts, songs, one liners and concepts for stories and I just add whenever an idea pops up. Images as well. I keep those on Pinterest in a folder called random writing ideas.

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I've lifted scenes and small ideas from dumb/dead stories and managed to work them into some other stories where it serves a purpose, but generally speaking, that is the best my dumb stories can hope for- to have their corpses scavenged by my febrile mind's concept vultures and possibly live on in some tiny way through a viable story.

*grimace* It's sorta like telling someone you're about to eat that they'll live forever now through you. Probably no comfort for them, but still true, in a warped, meta kind of way...

BiscuitHammer said:

*grimace* It's sorta like telling someone you're about to eat that they'll live forever now through you. Probably no comfort for them, but still true, in a warped, meta kind of way...

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... and he's back to vore...

JasonClearwater said:

I write them down, but I don't throw any of them away. I've got folders full of partly completed ideas and half-finished novels that got interrupted by life, and weren't good enough to commit to finishing.

I've got over a dozen stories/projects I've started work on, that range from 700 words (arguably the worst idea of the lot, about a guy who offers his roommate up for casual sex on Craig's List to get back at him for... something. Any excuse, really), through to 9000 words on something I know won't do well on Lit, but that I'll write anyway, that's an extension of my Jesse & Will universe.

All of them are 'dumb' ideas if I'm honest, but they'll keep me amused while I write them.

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I write lots and lots of dumb stories, meant for me alone, and my amusement. I know they're dumb, and self-indulgent, but I don't care. Since I don't intend to inflict them on the world, they can be as dumb as I like. All that matters is that I'm amused.

They usually get broken out when I'm experiencing severe writer's block and want to keep my brainknife whetted on a sharpening stone.

BiscuitHammer said:

I write lots and lots of dumb stories, meant for me alone, and my amusement. I know they're dumb, and self-indulgent, but I don't care. Since I don't intend to inflict them on the world, they can be as dumb as I like. All that matters is that I'm amused.

They usually get broken out when I'm experiencing severe writer's block and want to keep my brainknife whetted on a sharpening stone.

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A giant, cannibalistic sharpening stone...

I know what you mean, though. I have a friend who caused me physical pain when he said he'd written fifty thousands words of a novel, decided it was no good, and then deleted it.

Off his hard drive. Gone.

How anyone can do that, I don't know. There had to have been something salvageable. That's just madness.

JasonClearwater said:

A giant, cannibalistic sharpening stone...

I know what you mean, though. I have a friend who caused me physical pain when he said he'd written fifty thousands words of a novel, decided it was no good, and then deleted it.

Off his hard drive. Gone.

How anyone can do that, I don't know. There had to have been something salvageable. That's just madness.

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That would kill me. I'm pretty sure literally. If I'd seen your friend do that, I'm not entirely sure that I could have refrained from defenestrating them, at the very least.

No, just... no.

Welcome to the dumb, blind, lame and lazy plot bunny ranch. I have pens full of them in all sorts of shape. Nothing goes to waste. Maybe that's nothing leaves the depths of my hard drive. I have things on my backup drive I'm scared to look at.

Some do eventually escape as stories but it seems like it is fewer and fewer for Lit, I'm sorry to say. The ones that put greenbacks in the bank seem to get pardons a lot faster.

I’m a pack rat on my story ideas. I don’t throw anything away. In my eyes, the only dumb story is a story that isn’t told. As a transvestite, I have a lifetime of stories I can and should be telling
Kant

I have an alphabetically organized, numbered list of story ideas, which I give tentative titles or descriptions, in Word format that I update from time to time as worthy or semi-worthy ideas pop into my head. Some of them have made their way into semi-written drafts, some have become published stories, others languish in the plot bunny bin. The list is long enough that there's no way for me to catch up to it. I haven't added to it much lately because I've been very focused on finishing stories I'm already working on. And sometimes new ideas jump to the head of the queue and force me to turn my attention away from the list. But it's a useful resource.

I have a couple of beginnings, a couple of endings and several scenes in between written down.
The most difficult thing for me is to find out which parts belong together to make a sensible story.

As someone who enjoys writing but struggles to come up with things to write about, I hate you all.

LoquiSordidaAdMe said:

As someone who enjoys writing but struggles to come up with things to write about, I hate you all.

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Can you channel that hate onto your pages?

"Write drunk, edit sober." - Attributed to Hemingway

I have plenty of stories that I started on and never finished. Sometimes that`s because it`s not good enough; sometimes I lost interest; sometimes I simply don`t know how to continue them. And sometimes I indeed take parts and incorporate them into a different story. So yeah, I kind of know where you`re coming from.

I stopped writing down all ideas though; if it`s a good idea it`ll haunt me until I write a story about it. If it isn`t a good idea, it usually disappears in the next few days and I can`t even recall it anymore. The good ideas usually expand so that all of a sudden some character appears in it and bring it to life af some point, getting me an idea of how the majority of the plot will go.
I`m not always as fond of a good idea as I should be, because 'haunting' isn`t entirely wrong; I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with a plot twist and then can`t get back to sleep because I get too excited about it. Which is pretty nasty if you need to go to work with only two hours of sleep done.

BiscuitHammer said:

They usually get broken out when I'm experiencing severe writer's block and want to keep my brainknife whetted on a sharpening stone.

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Ironically, the story I`m currently posting on lit is actually one of those. I have been so long out of the writing game I couldn`t manage to write a proper description or dialogue anymore. Decided I would write something I always had trouble with (erotica) and that story came to life. It demanded I rewrote parts and eventually it got good enough that I ended up posting here. Ratings so far seem to agree that it was worth posting here Although that is no guarantee for the rest of the story of course.

JasonClearwater said:

I have a friend who caused me physical pain when he said he'd written fifty thousands words of a novel, decided it was no good, and then deleted it.

Off his hard drive. Gone.

Click to expand...

I have written one novel a long time ago when I had just started writing (aside from a dozen short stories). ~40.000 words and it was completed, edited (by myself) and all. Then my hard drive died and I got stuck with one printed version. It took me years to scan/OCR that thing and it`s still a garbled piece of work due to me saving on ink back when I printed it.
Still having trouble to start correcting all the OCR errors, but reading it back now I think I might be better off rewriting it instead. It could be so much better. Sometimes experience shows you how you could`ve done things better.

BiscuitHammer said:

Writing down each and every story idea I have (for Lit or otherwise), and then revisiting it at a later date to consider it's viability.

Is this a good story? Is it phenomenally stupid? If it's a good idea, am I the one who should be writing it?

I've taken to pitching story ideas to myself, trying to sell it, as if I was sitting on one side of a desk, looking skeptical, while Enthusiastic Writer Me tries to plug it.

I've managed to discard several pants-on-head retarded storylines this way, often mentioning them to friends to see if maybe they can make something of it. If it sounds stupid to you, it'll sound stupid to everyone else.

Then I remember that someone once walked into a producer's office and said "Okay, picture this... an old, washed up Elvis, living in a retirement home in Texas, alongside a black JFK, fights an Egyptian mummy..."

And I'll be damned if that didn't turn out to be an amazing movie.

I wonder if any of those stupid storylines I threw away or gave to friends have ever turned into something brilliant?

#missedopportunities

What are some dumb ideas you've considered and then thrown away? And no, I'm not trying to filch your ideas...

Click to expand...

First of all this
https://www.r-word.org/r-word-effects-of-the-word.aspx



And I always jot down ideas I have, and some times if I have an idea for a part in something I'm working on I go ahead and write it. I don't think there's such thing as a dumb idea for a story, some things may not work, but there's probably been a story written about everything at some point in time.

JasonClearwater said:

A giant, cannibalistic sharpening stone...

I know what you mean, though. I have a friend who caused me physical pain when he said he'd written fifty thousands words of a novel, decided it was no good, and then deleted it.

Off his hard drive. Gone.

How anyone can do that, I don't know. There had to have been something salvageable. That's just madness.

Click to expand...

I'm sometimes brutal like that - the longest thing I've trashed irretrievably was about 10,000 words. I don't regret it, because it would have just sat there like some malevolent thing, saying, "fiiinish me, fiiiinish me," until it crawled up from the hard drive and oozed over the keyboard.

CoffeeWithMonkeys said:

First of all this
https://www.r-word.org/r-word-effects-of-the-word.aspx

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^^this. Thanks CWM.

I have a file full of story ideas, but for me, it's turning them into a full story that's the tough bit. Too many ideas and it just gets distracting - I get stalled on one story and start thinking "maybe I should go write that other idea instead" which leads to a bunch of incomplete drafts.

and, yes, Bubba Ho-Tep was excellent.

electricblue66 said:

it would have just sat there like some malevolent thing, saying, "fiiinish me, fiiiinish me," until it crawled up from the hard drive and oozed over the keyboard.

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Sounds like an encounter with Nate.

LoquiSordidaAdMe said:

As someone who enjoys writing but struggles to come up with things to write about, I hate you all.

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Seriously, it's everything you see. The way a girl sits with a guy on a bus. Looking at him. Why's she looking at him like that? What's the story there? Is he looking back? What's his expression? Why? What's going to happen?

A restaurant? A bar? A party? I met a guy who turned into a boyfriend at a college party after he stood on me at a party. We started talking about bdsm..... story.

Just little every day things where people meet and things happen. Tomorrow, take a pen and a notepad and just walk around a mall and watch people. Or go on Pinterest and look for photos. It's like everything else, if you want to get better at it you have to practice. For the rest of this month, come up with one story idea every day.

Take that one about the couple on the bus. She's a friend of his little sister. She has a crush on him but he doesn't know it. He thinks she's attractive but she's his little sisters friend and he doesn't want to come on to her but her like to. Passion, attraction, desire, conflict. It's all there waiting to come out in a story.

I have one or two story ideas that I have notes on and I doubt I will ever use them. I deleted some old notes already because I don't even get what I was talking about.

Ideas come when I need them. Sometimes they come when I don't need them, but I figure they'll be back.

I lost something like 170,000 words in one story because of a disk failure. The story had reached the point where it became a scratch pad for new and different ideas. The ideas were still there after the story was gone. I have one series that spun off from it, and another story that was pretty straight from my recollection of the original with a few changes to take it out of its original context. The research I did for it is likely to produce more stories in the future.

The biggest chunk of story I've deleted and walked away from was probably around 6,000 words. That was just last fall. The story was a complete miscarriage of the original concept. It's still well-fixed in memory, but I don't think there's anything there to recover. It was just a mistake.

ChloeTzang said:

Seriously, it's everything you see. The way a girl sits with a guy on a bus. Looking at him. Why's she looking at him like that? What's the story there? Is he looking back? What's his expression? Why? What's going to happen?

A restaurant? A bar? A party? I met a guy who turned into a boyfriend at a college party after he stood on me at a party. We started talking about bdsm..... story.

Just little every day things where people meet and things happen. Tomorrow, take a pen and a notepad and just walk around a mall and watch people. Or go on Pinterest and look for photos. It's like everything else, if you want to get better at it you have to practice. For the rest of this month, come up with one story idea every day.

Take that one about the couple on the bus. She's a friend of his little sister. She has a crush on him but he doesn't know it. He thinks she's attractive but she's his little sisters friend and he doesn't want to come on to her but her like to. Passion, attraction, desire, conflict. It's all there waiting to come out in a story.

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Hey, thanks for the encouragement, Chloe. I really appreciate you taking the time. One idea a day for a month, huh? I feel lucky that I've come up with two ideas in the last month. But I didn't get where I am today by ignoring advice from people who know what they're talking about. Ok, I'll do it. There is no try.

LoquiSordidaAdMe said:

As someone who enjoys writing but struggles to come up with things to write about, I hate you all.

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If you have trouble coming up with ideas, just go out of the house, go grocery shopping, go to the movies, it doesn`t matter what. And then just look around, see what people do, see how people interact with each other and just write them down. One of them might just give you an idea for a story, short or large. And perhaps two of them combined does that for you. It doesn`t matter if it produces a bad story, because even a bad story contains aspects you can incorporate into a good story.

A little while ago I was standing in a park, looking across a field of corn and on the other end of that was a gas station. And that sprouted a story about a 'What if ...' about people going to that gas station. It`s the small things, the details that start a story.

Gentleman_G said:

If you have trouble coming up with ideas, just go out of the house, go grocery shopping, go to the movies, it doesn`t matter what. And then just look around, see what people do, see how people interact with each other and just write them down. One of them might just give you an idea for a story, short or large. And perhaps two of them combined does that for you. It doesn`t matter if it produces a bad story, because even a bad story contains aspects you can incorporate into a good story.

A little while ago I was standing in a park, looking across a field of corn and on the other end of that was a gas station. And that sprouted a story about a 'What if ...' about people going to that gas station. It`s the small things, the details that start a story.

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Yes, coz in the end it's Literotica and we're writing erotica and, with exceptions, that generally involves people. And people interact.

Here's another approach. Just go thru Literotica and look for a story you like. What do you like about it? Then take that and rewrite it into your own story. My first story here, Hayley's Party, started that way.