What are some rough idea drafts for stories you have?

[Dazhak]

I prefer to use the four sentence method.

This method looks interesting! Did you come up with it? I tried to search it up but I didn't find anything that looked like your example...

[greyskieshappymind]

I have a fantasy world idea called the Februarium. A pocket universe for "little lost things" where discarded ragdolls and craft projects can slip through the earth and land in the care of an inventor who can turn them into automatons. It started as a concept for a TTRPG or browser pet game, but recently I got the idea that humans could end up there if, for example, the selection process for lost toys was loose; "body of any material, devalued, and far from someone that loves it".

Would love to make a CRPG where you play as a human that falls in, and explores things like grief and escapism. I just finished Disco Elysium so I'm also thinking of like, having intrusive thoughts be the narrator and interrogating how the player interacts with a fantasy world, like if they think it's beneath them or if they love it, and the balance of escapism vs growth.

From art to programming to narrative structure, I know nothing of making a CRPG, but I did scribble down the first beat of the main quest. "Hang on, you want to leave already? Back to the world that pushed you through the margins? There's no denying that you're here because everyone around you thinks you're worthless. Nothing you've done so far has shown that you have the endurance, the willpower. The least you can do is fight someone. Maybe then you can prove you're ready to face the world once again. That other, much ruder, human would be the perfect place to start."

My idea was that the person ages and can't get their "youth" back, but the aging process freezes once they are allowed to take the medicine again (if they are at all, there would be life sentences etc). Probably people start taking it around age 25-30, so anyone who looks much older than that would stand out a lot. I meant it as a commentary on the penal system and how you can't get back years spent in prison, and how your past mistakes stay with you and make you stand out to others. Unjust convictions would take a toll for sure, but only in a way that emphasizes the way they affect people in the real world... Allowing someone to "rot" (age and die) as a punishment is a great way to get rid of people... But I feel I'm not smart enough to actually go through with writing this story.  & I have a feeling something like it exists already, it can't be that original an idea. There's gotta be some sci-fi short story like this, in a magazine from the 60s :P

I would read this story, and even if the idea isn't truly original, only you can tell your version of this story. Because there are things that matter more, like how passionate you are about the concept and how the story grows through the drafts. What I'm trying to internalise is that I'm happy when I'm reading books and taking little things I like apart to think about how I'd put that in a story I like.

Just because someone's done it before doesn't mean it's the end all be all.

Spoiler: the one immortal humans story I know

Spoiler

A Twitch streamer I follow brought up "Scythe" by Neal Shusterman. It deals with immortal humans, a group that's meant to "replicate" death called the Scythe, and an AI that governs the world and commander of the Scythe. Didn't talk about it much, brought up a scene that really stuck with him where the Scythe go to an art museum and art by immortal humans is so soulless. Could be interesting to read if you're looking for how this author interpreted and grew his immortal humans.

[close]

[invader_gvim]

This method looks interesting! Did you come up with it? I tried to search it up but I didn't find anything that looked like your example...

I got told the method on an old reddit post that I've forgotten. I think its most useful for a sort of rough draft outline. My writing process is -->

Make 4 sentence method outline

Make rough draft

Make 2nd draft treating the rough draft as an outline

Either make small changes or make a 3rd draft if I'm not satisfied.



I ended up throwing away the specific example I used, however the ideas which created it continued to spin around in my head and I'm 1/3rd of the way done. I wrote the completed draft for the first part, and put it on my website. The second part I'm restarting today because the rough draft for it wasn't good enough. Here is the story if you want to read it. It's very violent and uses horror tropes. https://invadergvim.neocities.org/skylight_legends/dataslate_menu

The music was made by my friend Sphynz and I am very much enjoying the web design aspect of using Pinta to draw buttons & doodads for the website.

[EdenInTheGardens]

I have a bunch of comic ideas but my most recent one is about a person who is on a pilgrimage except the end of the world is happening at the same time, there is a sort of void "growth" that is slowly taking over and engulfing everything.

It would be 1 chapter 1 story deal with the Pilgrim helping whoever they can whenever they can with the main storyline being about the Pilgrim coming to terms with the end of the world through their religion.

I really like this thread it's very fun to read through everyone's ideas !

[Rosaria Delacroix]

 

I just got around to adding a little page on my personal website to catalogue my most recent brain worm of an idea, actually! It's been chewing away at the back of my mind for awhile now. The process by which I go about committing to projects is a little backwards to most creatives I've bumbled into- I'll make the cover art first, decide on a title, and then sit down to write a short blurb that covers at least a gloss over of the 'feeling' of the story. It'll have the lead's name, at least, and something about their goal- though it's usually a bit airy and open ended, since I'm very much so a fly by the seat of your pants kind of writer, rather than someone who keeps meticulous outlines.

Anywhosies- Mouthwashing has been on the brain as of late, since it taps right into the part of me that loves character driven horror and stories in space. It also has been making me super nostalgic for the space opera podcast Wolf 359 I'm in love with- Warren Kepler is my favourite character from it, I've written lots of fanfiction from his perspective and exploring his relationships with his crew pre-mission. A lot of fanfiction surrounding his crew explores what the sole survivor lives with- being haunted by ghosts, resentful and angry with the man he loved for maintaining Kepler's persona- perfectly crafted, flawlessly suited to his job: and an empty husk of a human behind behind it. As one of his infamous quotes goes-

"Kepler: You think you know me? That you’ve met me? No. You’ve met the Artist Formerly Known as Warren Kepler. You’ve met my job. Aside from that, there’s no one left for you to know. I’m gone. I’ve been goddamn canceled. Show’s over, and there will be no encores. All that’s left is this. "

(He also really likes funk music in canon, as he was apparently once part of a funk band himself. He's quite longwinded, and makes coy allusions to outlandish stories of the life he's led, to which he'll rabbit on at length- quite relatable.)

One of the play by post tabletop roleplay game campaigns I'm running with my childhood bestfriend and ex boyfriend is set along the premise of Mouthwashing, basically- crew in space on board a ship, one of them loses it, very classic space horror set up. I had been about halfway through the first draft of a novelization along similar lines, but realized that I was really more so interested in exploring the emotional reverberations of a horrific crash like that, which is what drew my interest to Mouthwashing, rather than cutting the story off once everyone's dead, or the killer's been found out.

Healing and recovery- the fraught, painful, messy journey that that is, and all of the maladaptive coping mechanisms and high kilter emotions that come with it: that's the more interesting aspect to me. I like body horror and gore, but typically as an exploration of a sense of 'wrongness' with bodies and our relationships to them as tied to our personal identity, or along feminist horror lines of reproductive horror, and as fun as slashers are to watch, I don't really like writing them all of the time. Sometimes as a little treat is okay.

But anyway- I decided I would start this story after what would generally be seen as the conclusion to the typical spin on the premise of an imposter or invader on board. What happens to the person who survives? What do they do with the weight of the past? How can you move on- do you ever learn to live with the crushing imposition of all that you've lost- your crew, your career, your body? The creeping horror of your body not quite being your own, at being at defiant opposition with it- and struggling through feelings of grief and self interrogation are very familiar: and it's always cathartic to draw from painful experiences to write: it's often surprising what you can mine from them. It helps to frame the character's mindset and motivations, and scrape away at layers of masking or lies that've become truths even to them- the distortion of living memory, how warped they become with each recall: and the dead haunting the narrative- all very gothic, all very much so up my alley.

Circling back around to that blurb, here it is. The working title is 'Intercession' for the time being, and I'm planning on handwriting this novel through 2025.

"Captain Juniper Laurent is plagued with survivor's guilt. Having walked away from the fiery crash of the spaceship The Aurora, he desperately wants to confront the man responsible. Faith shattered, and struggling with the physical and mental aftermath of his life's implosion, Juniper finds himself haunted by the dead and living in equal measure."

[nattoppet]

Hey. that's my first interaction here btw xD

Basically, i have been working on this idea since 2017 and i already have written a lot of pages and mini-books, the whole idea is a post-apocalyptic world set in a reality in wich a comet struck earth in the middle of the WW1, and a thousand years later society and humanity struggles to recall of what earth used to be before the comet, plus, the comet brought with him a strange chemical that changed the color of chlorophyte (from green to purple), the entire aesthetic of this universe is half dieselpunk and half biopunk, something more original that i call "Penumpunk",the name of this book that im writing is "Penumbralia"

[apricior]

Hey. that's my first interaction here btw xD

Basically, i have been working on this idea since 2017 and i already have written a lot of pages and mini-books, the whole idea is a post-apocalyptic world set in a reality in wich a comet struck earth in the middle of the WW1, and a thousand years later society and humanity struggles to recall of what earth used to be before the comet, plus, the comet brought with him a strange chemical that changed the color of chlorophyte (from green to purple), the entire aesthetic of this universe is half dieselpunk and half biopunk, something more original that i call "Penumpunk",the name of this book that im writing is "Penumbralia"

This is such a cool concept!!! I'd love to read it if you ever post it somewhere :)

Personally, I'm juggling like a billion ideas at the same time. If we're not counting fanfiction, I'm planning a coming-of-age romcom that I want to send to a literary contest about a group of internet friends who start living together because of college and then two of them fall in love. It's going to be a love letter to fandoms, ttrpgs and online communities (and, of course, about trans gay people).

Another project that I've been working on since... 2016 is about a historian who is investigating the mysterious disappearances that happened in a small town and then ends up traveling back in time to be present when The Events happen. This one's gonna have a folk horror kind of vibe, with ghosts and creepy stuff 

[Seryndelle]

One of the play by post tabletop roleplay game campaigns I'm running with my childhood bestfriend and ex boyfriend is set along the premise of Mouthwashing, basically- crew in space on board a ship, one of them loses it, very classic space horror set up.

I'm sorry to be focusing on entirely the wrong thing here, but you have no idea how excited I am to find someone else on this forum who's running a play-by-post TTRPG! I'm guessing you're using some kind of sci-fi system rather than something like D&D? But yes, I'm of the opinion that PbPs are probably the easiest way to turn a TTRPG into a story, given that it's practically written out already and all that needs doing is a little bit of tweaking.

I've also been inclined to write a story myself about a previous campaign I ran (it wasn't PbP, but it was in Pathfinder 2e) that unfortunately fizzled out. I'm hoping it'll finally give me the opportunity to tell the narrative I wanted to explore at the table! I've changed the setting quite a lot because it was set on Golarion (the "default" world in Pathfinder), and I wanted to keep my options open rather than risking any kind of copyright battle in the future if I ever decided to publish this. But I'm getting ahead of myself—I've written basically a page at most, and that was a few months ago!