Unused story ideas you can use

[IdleRich]

I often come up with what I think is a good idea for a story or a novel. But I never have the time or the stamina or perhaps just the gumption to... well, it depends, sometimes I never even start, sometimes I start but I don't finish. And with some ideas that feels like a bit of a shame.

It occurred to me that other people might find themselves in that situation, with some interesting ideas for books that they never quite managed to get off the ground... and so this is a thread for people to place their unfinished and uncopyrighted story ideas in, with the (admittedly very unlikely) hope that someone else will be inspired to take the idea and run with it, ultimately delivering the complete work that the opening deserved.

Or if not that, we can at least marvel/laugh at the ideas the members of the dissensus hive brain almost made into a work of genius.

 

[IdleRich]

I'll get the ball rolling. This is a very vague one, really just a couple of general ideas inspired in a way by Agatha Christie type detectives. One thing that always occurs to me, in fact I'd say it leaps right out at the reader, is how ridiculous it is that Miss Marple is present at so many murders (Poirot, being a private detective, I will just about allow could conceivably be at the scene for so many) that she always manages to neatly tie up in a package and triumphantly solve. Way too good to be true, the obvious explanation is that Marple is a psychotic serial killer who murders purely for pleasure and for the fun of outwitting the police etc

As she never has any kind of financial gain or similar she is totally motiveless and never even considered as a suspect, but ultimately she takes a sick pleasure in murdering several people wherever she goes and then derives an almost sexual satisfaction from the final stage of her crime - the cherry on the top of each murder is the utterly inescapable framing of an innocent bystander. Her machinations wrap them up as helplessly as a fly in a spider's web and then send them to the noose desperately protesting their innocence. No doubt she visits them in prison to gloat.

Anyway, I think someone who can master the style and who is prepared to put in the research could certainly select a few of the most suitable MM stories and ret-con them to make her the murderer.

The advantage with this is, if it takes off there is a whole library of stories to exploit and pervert.

Off you go... good luck!

 

[IdleRich]

Even vaguer, I had the idea of a dinner party weekend type thing with two seemingly unconnected murders. The first victim is Poirot himself and the murders ARE unrelated, it's just that every time I see a Poirot thing on telly, I always think "why the hell didn't they kill him first just to get him out of the way, noone else alive would have been able to solve the murder?".

In fact the idea for this came from a single, simple phrase - after Poirot is found sadly bludgeoned to death someone ejaculates "It was horrible, his little grey cells were all over the floor!".

And so, killing Poirot first, does it work? Does the murderer get away with it or does someone else step up? Well I haven't really decided yet, so if any of you take this story on and finish it, it's up to you...

 

[IdleRich]

Ok bit of a change of theme. As a child I always found something enticing about books which posited a hidden world of magic superimposed on our own, close enough to touch but hidden from the eyes of those not blessed with some kind of gift - be that simply imagination or something else.

I suppose I'm thinking of things such as The Dark is Rising series or Alan Garner's novels - I recall the name The Weird Stone of Brisingamen though little about it - then there was The Box of Delights. Normally there is a child or group of children who joins forces with some magical creatures and possibly talking animals to battle an evil version of the same.

Or when I was younger still there was Enid Blyton and the Magic Faraway Tree, or the talking animals in The Wind in the Willows who had to fight against weasels or something I think, and I dimly remember another cosy story involving talking anthropomorphic animals that made for an incredibly seductive world.

So anyway, I wanted to create a world of that nature, a twee village by the side of a stream in a dark and overgrown wood, inhabited by pixies and gnomes alongside tiny talking creatures. I'm imagining an Arthur Rackham illustration come to life and becoming the setting for a number of interlinked short stories....

The stories themselves are gritty and grim. Gangs of pixies fight each other to control the trade of a horribly addictive drug made from the shell of a ladybird. There is loads of brutal violence; vicious mobsters with names such as Bluebell or Peach Blossom garrote their enemies with spiderweb or disembowel them with thorns. As well as drugs the gangs control enforced interspecies prostitution and try to fix the high stakes slug races and suchlike.

Some stories are dispassionate unflinching relating of gangland violence, whereas another might be a more personal look at a homeless gnome trying to survive on the streets.

To be honest this one needs a little work, it was something that came to me a couple of days ago while I couldn't sleep...

 

[IdleRich]

Anyhow, surely some of the rest of you have some abortive story ideas to share... I'm starting to get a feeling that those of you who do have stories somewhere in the back of your mind are also clinging on to the idea that one day you will write them and become the new JK Rowling (except without the transphobia) and so there is no way you will share them... I think that you are so worried that someone will take your ideas and make them a success that you daren't reveal your ideas. Shame on you!

 

[william_kent]

Gangs of pixies fight each other to control the trade of a horribly addictive drug made from the shell of a ladybird. There is loads of brutal violence; vicious mobsters with names such as Bluebell or Peach Blossom garrote their enemies with spiderweb or disembowel them with thorns. As well as drugs the gangs control enforced interspecies prostitution and try to fix the high stakes slug races and suchlike.

unfortunately a variation on this idea was done badly as an amazon tv series called Carnival Row where "mythical creatures... have fled their war-torn homeland and gathered in the city as tensions are simmering between citizens and the growing immigrant population".

there are pixie brothels ( the pixies have wings which allow for more "positions" than the human sex workers can provide ), thieve's guilds dealing in drugs ( not sourced from ladybird shells though! ), extortion, hits for hire, etc., and a radical "puck" cult, all set in a city somewhat similar to London where a series of Jack the Ripper murders are spreading fear among the populace and Orlando Bloom is ordered to investigate...

 

[IdleRich]

Oh yeah, I did see that, though in my head I was imagining something quite different...

One thing is, like I say, I quite often struggle to sleep, and one thing I try to do when I can't sleep is make up a story or a scenario or something... but, then I realised I was creating loads of scenarios that were being started and never used, and that made me even more frustrated, and less sleepy....

But, I reckon, if I at least note down the stupid ideas I come up with, then maybe that method of trying to sleep could become viable again.

I will warn you though not to expect abt originality in stories I come up with that way (I mean even less than normal).

In this case though I don't think I was thinking so much about that thing with Orlando Bloom, I think it was directly inspired by those sickly and weird Rackham pictures and also the bit in All The Devils Are Here about the painting by an artist called... I think he might be called Dadd or something and he did a painting with a fairy chopping an acorn or something... do you know what I'm on about at all here?

 

[IdleRich]

I do find those Rackham pics kinda creepy... not intentionally so I feel.

There is an illustrator from Denmark called Kay Neilsen that I like... and there is another illustrator whose name I'm struggling to remember that to my mind makes up the third part of a triumvirate with Nielsen and Rackham... hmmm

Anyway, here are some random pics from Kay Nielsen, I dunno how well known he is, but his pictures are incredible - proper art nouveau stuff that seems more like Beardsley or Dore than pics to stick beside a story for children. I'm on the verge of saying that they are wasted on children which would of course be incredibly foolish - thinking back on it stories were probably the best thing in the world for me up to a certain age and magical pictures beside them can only have made them better.

I suppose that what I am saying is that there is a lot more to Nielsen's stuff than to Rackham's work which, at least in the UK (unsurprisingly I suppose) seems to be much more famous and highly regarded. But does anyone know another children's illustrator in a similar style whose name I can't recall just now?

 

[william_kent]

do you know what I'm on about at all here?

Richard Dadd - The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke

 

[william_kent]

anyway, your idea sounds better

I had completely forgotten about the Orlando Bloom thing, but then I read your idea and thought yours was great and was lying awake, thinking about what a good story could be written and then suddenly remembered the amazon series and how you'd have to make your one better, which wouldn't be hard, just because some idiot would make a comparison, just like I have...

 

[IdleRich]

Richard Dadd - The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke

Name that tune in one!

I was thinking of something that was simultaneously way more twee and cutesy, but at the same time much much nastier than the series.

I'm definitely seeing true little people riding, I dunno, beetles or earwigs etc in a magic village in an enchanted wood called Dingly Dell or Elderberry Hollow or something.

Tiny gnomes that live in a cute little toadstool... until a gang of vicious pixie thugs (nasty, brutish and short) smash the door in and drag them all out and nail them to the stalk.

Leprechauns being tortured by sadistic gangs of feral faeries hopped up on nettle meth with a leader called Tinkerbell who is determined to get her hands on their pot of gold.

Some semblance of order is kept by a corrupt police force which is little more than the biggest gang, a bunch of thugs that answers to the local warlord - a brutish goblin 'king' - and which results in the creation of a savage underworld where life is cheap - and yet at times you find moments of touching tenderness, almost invariably snuffed out within seconds of their occurrence...

Basically pretty fucking far from the noble, elegant elves of Tolkein, although occasionally you do get the odd overdressed and handsome flash git with expensive gear poncing into town on a fancy armoured dragonfly or the like which they tie up outside the tavern before flashing the cash and banging the barmaids as the locals mutter enviously into their acorns of watered down fermented elderflower.

This is actually growing out of control now...

 

[william_kent]

This is actually growing out of control now...

better get typing, it's writing itself

 

[william_kent]

I was inspired to get the AI to illustrate your story...

 

[william_kent]

pixie youth

 

[william_kent]

unhoused fairy

 

[WashYourHands]

via a squat party

 

[IdleRich]

No more stories? I thought this was the best idea for a thread I'd ever had. I thought on a board bursting with creative but essentially lazy fuckers there would be hundreds of untold weird and wonderful stories ready for just this outlet.

 

[IdleRich]

Ok one more from me. About fifteen years ago I had some idea of a noir called Map Without A Man in which I sort of nicked a load of ideas from Paul Auster's City of Glass and the Japanese film Man Without A Map - oh and I chucked in a supercomputer made up of a swarm of killer bees. Each bee was like switch in an AI or something and as well as being a computer they would go round to the house of people investigating the baddie and kill the fuck out of them. And probably if you joined up all the addresses of the bee victims on map it spelled a message or something.

I actually wrote about 10,000 words of that one and then lost it somehow I suppose. I forget the details but the whole thing was inspired by a terrible pun cos they were controlled by a guy called Roger Corman which of course is the name of the famous producer of films, known as The King of the Bs (as in B-movies).

 

[WashYourHands]

Wrote about 15,000 words, drafts, character arcs mapped, about a triskelion themed plot

an archaeology dig on a Romano-British site uncovers a broach but the broach has a provenance - an Iron Age coronation gone wrong, a botched kidnapping of a visiting Roman politician with a background as the invasion of Mona, a subsequent turn overs the centuries to clerics and their interaction with someone called a Sin Eater who’s asked to preside over a funerary rite (which goes tits up) and then the dig itself set in the 80’s with friction between locals, aloof academics and a background of The Troubles (which goes tits up)

I couldn’t be fucked trying to wrap it up so tried it as poetry instead, be fucked if I’m letting you lot read it let’s just say it ends with all main characters converging (too The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) in this case staring at the reader instead

Another fail was about growing cannabis, how you start with one room but end up with 4 rental properties runNing 24/7, to gripping wholesale on a trawler in the North Sea. Grow as metaphor. The de-evolution of the plant, violence, in a sort of post-rave British apocalypse. Futile and even less easy in poetry

 

[IdleRich]

Wicked stuff, that first one sounds ace. Puts me in mind a little of this

The Dream of Scipio (novel) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Very ambitious though, I can see why you couldn't battle through to the end.

I knew there had to be some wild ideas out there - or in here - somewhere.