Story ideas you never followed through with?

Post Reply New Topic

List an idea of a story that you wanted to type, but you never went through with because you either got bored of the idea or people would think the idea is too disturbing...

That may cause literary theft. I have unfinished stories, and stories I never wrote, but I can't post them here for other reasons. Also, there's something I started recently, but I think that a canon fact I found sort of contradicts it, if and when I finished it it'll be OOC.

I think it's fine for writers, or musicians, to have a fair number of unfinished ideas in the works to draw from.

Ideas are nothing in themselves. They're all over the place, and even if someone "steals" your idea, the story they'd write with it will come out totally different.

I'm not writing down any ideas because there are too many of them. The ones I haven't written (yet) are simply because I don't have time for them all. (And I get at least a hundred new ideas by the time I finish one, so I don't expect to ever catch up...)

Astronauts arrive at distant planet, among the various ancient alien artifacts they find...an alien on a crucifix, and these marks: _|_|_|O

(It's mine, mine!)

I have many unfinished ideas.
From time to time I got a new idea and my ideas become more complex.
One idea was that in a near future (perhaps 20 years) the situation on earth is hopless.
Than someone founded an organization.
This organization started a programm.
With primitive space technology, they started to build a small station on the moon and to overlife there.
At the end it isn't anymore possible to live on earth, but on the moon and maybe the Mars are some few thousand humans.
So the earth is destroyed, but humans are still living.

I started a pastiche/homage to the film noir detective fiction but set it in a cyberpunk type of future in which the lead character - a private investigator, naturally - is helped along by people talking to him in his dreams. It turns out that they're real people, subconsciously helping him through the 'collective memory' of humanity.

The underlying reason is that the lead character has a microchip in his brain but it starts malfunctioning so he starts to 'pick up' these signals by mistake...other side-effects of the broken brain chip include a potentially terminal illness that could kill him before he solves the mystery.

I thought it was a neat idea at the time, but lacked the self-confidence to follow it to the end. Some elements of this premise are in the story I'm currently writing so I'm hoping to salvage some aspects of it.

^ That sounds cool.

Honor system: Don't steal my idea, I want to work on this one someday when I have more time for it. If you must, I guess I'll be pissed but what can I do.

Now...

I've got a piece of historical science fiction in mind that I've thought about. It was partly inspired by a weird dream I had. I've made up the names of the main characters, except for Edison and Tesla.

It takes place in 1891. The main character's father (Miles Chatham) is involved with the Edison company's electrification projects, and as a bonus from the company, is having a generator for electric light installed in the basement of his new home. While excavating part of the basement, brick fragments are found in the soil in one area. The workers think nothing of it, but our main character (William Chatham) explores further. The brick fragments come from a tunnel that was severed at some point, and seems to have never continued into the basement. Strangely, he finds that the tunnel was already electrified, but the wires cut where the severing happened. He also observes slight gravitational anomalies in the tunnel. For example, the lantern in his hand hangs just barely off of vertical, and a marble placed on the floor rolls in the same direction favored by the lantern (even up a slight incline).

Ultimately, William explores this tunnel and must breach a series of vault doors. While the family is holding a party one night to show off the new electric lights, William convinces a friend of the family who happens to be a locksmith to help him with this. Finally, he encounters a room with a device apparently manufactured by Nikola Tesla, accompanied by the remains of its operators. William seeks out the inventor. Tesla has no knowledge of the machine, and does not recognize it or the notebooks containing information about it. Strangely, however, the notebooks are dated decades into the future. It is deduced that it must be part of a time travel experiment that Tesla would someday work on. William and Tesla pour over the notebooks and study the machine, learning about the (presently) futuristic technology that made it possible. They ultimately intend to operate it, and they land themselves and the world in quite a predicament by doing so.

That's pretty much the summary of it. I have more details here and there, but nothing is really strung together yet.

I still have to work out how our 1890s characters practically managed to bring in the enormous amounts of AC power to operate the machine (which was built in the late 20s when that was common). Tesla's systems were AC, and Edison's were DC. Miles, being an Edison man, would never allow Tesla to replace his DC generator with an AC unit. Lots of work needs to be done to figure this one out. Maybe it could come to Miles losing his job over it or something... bringing more conflict into the story. Everyone gets screwed in the end anyway, so maybe that would work!

Mikael Aferfeldt of Opeth writes down his unfinished ideas for when he has writer's block. A good idea.

I had multiple concept albums (as a musician rather than a writer)...the first is a dystopian universe inspired by the book 1984, another was about the creation of a human being from zygote to adulthood and the challenges life brings during, another about recovery and the causes and effects of drug abuse, I could keep going. Having a lot of ideas is nice.

I have another idea.
What would be if the main character of a story started the hopless fight against the writer of this story.
How could a writer react against this?
How would a person in a story react when he or she knows that he or she is in a story?
Would he or she hate or like the writer?

I seem to recall seeing a movie years ago where a man's life was dictated by a writer, and he eventually found out. I can't remember the name, though.

This idea's been done. Not to say you can't do it again - just about every idea has been done before. The genius lies in how you do it, not the idea.

My unfinished story
12 hours untill midnight
I planned on making it poetic but never got around to it.
The essential idea is that as it gets closser to midnight the protagonist begins to notice a greater amount of stranger and un-nerving events unfolding which ends at midnight in some way that I havn't figured out. I had considered that perhaps the flying dutchman could arrive and claim the character while dropping hints to this end through the story. I will figure it out one day!

All of my current projects are classified as 'never followed through on'. Or, more accurately, 'haven't followed through on yet'.

1. A dark urban science-fantasy where a powerful mage, a cursed demoness, a biologically engineered ex-mercenary, and an angelic prostitute all become involved in various incidents that all culminate in the coming of an ancient (and self-fulfilling) prophecy that tells of a pre-destined romance that could very easily bring about the end of the world as they know it.

2. A post-apocalyptic biopunk story about a survivor outside the protective domed cities who encounters an escaped subject from a top-secret government bio-engineering facility, becomes a subject himself, and goes on to defy the government's plan to use the subjects to conduct a genocidal campaign against the creatures the subjects themselves have their DNA spliced with.

3. A post-cyberpunk story about a group of hackers who become emmeshed in a far-reaching conspiracy that turns out to be an international terrorist plot to carry out a massive computer-viral attack on the United States, while also dealing with their own interpersonal issues while doing their best to prevent the terrorist attack and staying alive long enough to do it.

4. A space-opera-like story about a UN flight marshal who, after a experiencing terrifying audio-visual hallucinations during deep-space hijacking and heist gone wrong, investigates further, finds herself going through a terrorist organization, a private military company and a high-tech biological research company, to find a sinister plot to revolutionize human warfare.

5. A post-cyberpunk story about a highly-advanced, illegal, top-secret cyborg agent who, after a botched decommission and memory erasure, is found by a freelance hacker who begins to help her find out about her past and her purpose, even as the government frantically tries to loacte her and get her back before the public finds out about her existence.

6. A space-opera-like story about a crew of misfits who unknowingly come into possession of the personal effects of a famous revolutionary figure from a solar-system-wide civil war a hundred and fifty years before, and soon realize that they could very well end up being the harbingers and the eventual leaders of a second system-wide revolution.

7. A somewhat dark urban fantasy about Death's mortal daughter, and her journey to find her place in the world while helping the living and the dead; guiding the souls of the lost and the damned of both worlds, while also trying to live a normal life, given that she has a number of abilities that make it extremely hard for her to live as a regular human.

And there are several more that I haven't thought quite enough about to be able to give an accurate description of, yet.

I have a bunch of scrapped lyrics.

On the side of stories, there was this idea of a highschool that operates only at night. It would be written in the style of a mockumentary like Spinal Tap or Summer Heights high. There were seven characters I would focus on, most of them I forgot about, except for like three who I created searate stories for. Two of the three never got out of the second layer. The two were russian twin sisters separated at birth (one in Russia with her uncle, the other in America with the parents) that are uneasy around eachother.

The surviving night highschool character is the main character current webcomic i'm trying to make. Its working out just fine, but i've given just as much backstory to many of the minor characters.

There are a lot more, but I didn't want to fill the page with text.