Patton Oswalt has a bit about the guy who wrote the script for "Deathbed: the Bed that Eats People" and how he somehow found the strength to finish an awful project. This made me wonder what is the worst story idea that you've ever had?
When I was younger and developing my love for 80's movies I wanted to write a script for a Police Academy movie that would bring Steve Guttenberg's character back into the fold (I wish I was joking).
I would love to hear some of your "What was I thinking?" moments.
A cold sore with cognitive thought...but then I wrote it anyway and got it published.
File that under: just psychotic enough to work.
One time in a screenwriting forum online, a woman was talking about a story she was writing about the Civil War, "as told through the eyes of a horse". (From the horses' perspective!?)
I thought, that is the worst story idea I've ever heard. But now there is this Spielberg movie coming out called War Horse. Maybe she sold her script and it was rewritten to be a different war?
The movie is actually based on a play, which is based on a 1982 children's book (all of the same name). so unless her name is Michael Morpurgo, I suspect they are not the same.
I spent the first 3 years of the 21st Century working on the first of what was going to be an epic series of alternate histories where the Roman Empire not only survived to modern times alongside an ancient Chinese Dynasty, I think Kiev had a pretty major Empire, the Inca ran south America, the Iroquois held a bunch of the midwest and northeast and Rome held Florida and some land in north America along with the Caribbean. In Australia there was a federation of Aborigine Tribes who had repelled Roman invasion.
Now if you are expectinging me to explain the history behind all of these events the answer I constructed into the narrative was that, well, my main characters tended not to care. "That's ANCIENT history!" if someone would try to exposit that sort of information.
It started with the Iroquois backed rebellion of the American colonies from the Roman Empire. I had a lot of notes, probably 60 or 70 pages.
After that I think the next book was set in Australia and then Kiev, oh, I had big plans.
I mean, I still like alternate history, but I'm never using doodles on a blank world map as a plot outline again.
Every screenplay I've ever wrote.
@ BT are we talkin HSV-1 or HSV-2?
A giant quivering blanket of flesh that lives off the sexual energy of its houses inhabitants. Later it grows legs and runs around.
Since when is a new Police Academy with Steven Guttenberg considered a bad idea? I call bullshit. Great fucking idea!
Attack of the 100 foot Boston Terrier. Run for your lives, he may fart in our general direction.
I'm going to say something that makes me look like a jerk - but let me explain. I don't know that I have had a bad idea necessarily, although I have had several very poorly executed ideas. I still think they were all good ideas.
I did write something about how the pyramids were developed by superior desert goats. I guess if you want to call it a bad idea, you can.
Anything with goats being productive is good.
@Otis
Honestly I have a deep love for the works of "the Gutt" but i tried to write it all ironic and hipsterish which qualified me for a swift punch in the dick as far as I'm concerned. But I do still celebrate the entire Guttenberg collection and I deeply believe that the first Short Circuit is a masterpiece. I even used to be in a band called Jonny 5.
@ Chris
Have you seen the show Party Down? It's on Netflix streaming. There's an episode (I believe season two) where they go to Guttenberg's house. I also have a friend who's family friends with Guttenberg and spent a night drinking with him. He fucking rules.
@ Avery - I like the idea and agree with your assessment. It's the execution more than an idea. I'm currently working on something about two people pissed off which rodent represents the coming of spring. On face value, it sounds like a stupid idea, but it's shaping into something I didn't expect.
A "bad" idea is a great starting point.
@Nick
Until today, I was having one of my characters think his sentences in rhyme. I (The narrator) said it was a mental tick he was born with, like Tourette's or a stutter. So whenever the narrative was in that character's mind the lines were rhymed.
Driving to work this morning I thought, "Even though I'm writing a comedy, that is really stupid. And rather annoying to read." So I'm deleting it. He'll still be an oddball, but without the rhyme.
... "He says, “I’m leaving a note for my boss that I won’t be coming into work.”
Ha!
Great ending, too.
Picture the premise of They Live. Only the Rowdy Roddy Piper character is Hitler and Jews are the aliens. Making Hitler the unsung hero of WW2.
@Kirk -- haha! I thought that's what They Live was about anyway...
Yeah, but if you did it like that, you would get massive amounts of death threats, I would guess.
Do Jews issue Fatwa's? I never saw Munich.
I had an idea for a sci-fi about a droid(TM) who'd been programmed to think that there were people looking for him. He would just bump around like an idiot the whole time doing things nobody understood. Not much of a story, probably born from reading Camus.
EDIT: Actually, that could be cool. Anybody want to collaborate? One person writes the droid robot and the other writes the folks around him.
It'll be like I, Godot.
Do Jews issue Fatwa's? I never saw Munich.
Made me laugh.
No, Muslims have Fatwas. Israel has Mossad. The difference is that Salman Rushdie would never have survived Mossad.
The worst idea I had recently was "a dirty cop who boils people from the inside out with his touch." I am going to run with it, but try to come up with something cooler than boiling people.
I think my worst ideas are cliches that I think I can improve upon and then I'm like uhhh no.
Such as anything involving vampires, zombies, mutant apocalypses or psychic detectives.
Wouldn't a psychic detective just be like, "He did it," and it'd be over?
And that's why it would be a bad idea.
There are all sorts of ways to do it.
1. Everyone else is also psychic and have defenses against that sort of thing. (I think there are a couple of novels that do it this way, I've heard good things about at least one).
2. Your detective isn't a very powerful psychic, essentially this would be like the TV show "Psyche"
3. The psychic detective can only glean certain types of information, and has to use that information to solve crimes.
4. The psychic detective is blind, mute, and deaf. He knows who did the crime. But how can he prove it?
"The psychic detective is blind, mute, and deaf. He knows who did the crime. But how can he prove it?"
I find this premise to be flawed.
I mean, it's a pulpy idea, it's never going to be anything more than that, fine. All of the premises are flawed.
But it's possible to do and I've heard it can be entertaining although, to be honest, I have no interest in either psychics or detectives and haven't read or really exposed myself to anything like that.
A psychotic detective might be more interesting.
Been done. See: Bad Lieutenant
Everything's been done. Just give it a new twist so then it's new.
"...did I mention his best friend is a talking pie?"
I think the easiest way to find "worst ideas" is to look at any story written by someone under the age of fifteen. I use my old notebooks for material when I'm writing satire.
I'd say my worst idea produced after that age was probably the submission I have now. I thought it would be a great idea to write a letter to James Joyce detailing why I loved him but found his ideas flawed. It turned into a self-referential word-vomit about why I was happy to be a domestic in an abusive relationship. I tried to continue it and wound up with the pile of crap I'm currently wading through. It's easy to write a story about abuse, but difficult to find something worth writing about when every story of abuse becomes a story of empowerment.
Clutch -- I tried to look objectively at my family once so I wrote a short story about our daily life through the eyes of our dog. I was horrified. I literally printed it out, burned it, and buried the ashes under our clothesline.
