Scrapped or shelved ideas

I had a similar thread on an animation forum, here's the description:

Now, lets say somebody came up with a great story idea. But for some reason, it ends up on the cutting room floor, never to be picked up again (not to say that's always the case, however). That is how a story idea is scrapped or shelved.

So, I must ask: do you have interesting ideas for a book/film/video game/whatever that ended up tumbling to the cutting room floor? I'm just a bit curious.

The comic I'm working on was originally going to have another character in it, a bishonen who literally has no personality because his soul is trapped in another dimension. Also, he can manipulate his shadow to fight.

Something about the Cold War and werewolves. It was a few years ago, and I've lost my notes on it, but it would have involved a James Bond Expy with Baccano-esque immortality fighting werewolves in Mount Yamantau. Scrapped because I couldn't think of ways to make it challenging when the MC can essentially regenerate From a Single Cell.

Oh gods where do I start?

I keep trying to write about this snobbish but essentially good-natured city-state that's into high arts and sciences and gets destroyed from within by a foreign power. That plotline itself is awesome; it's everything else about the story that invariably seems weak.

Oh the ideas I could tell you. One I had to scrape at the moment is about futuristic race car driver and his career.

If I mentioned every idea I've either scrapped or shelved, I'd miss seeing Captain America this afternoon. A lot of my stuff I've kept saved, though, in the event that I'd wanna try working on it again.

Eh, there was this one thing I was thinking about witches in The Wild West.

Details. Now. :|

Well I guess it wasn't really The Wild West. It was later set but similar scenery. The idea is some horrible fusion with Harry Potter, Brokeback Mountain, and The Bechdel Test thread we had a while ago.

Because of various persection whatnot, most of the witches in the US lived in isolated towns in Wyoming, but shit starts going down elsewhere for witches in the world. They town the MC lives in decides to take in a girl (who is disguised as a boy) from Ukraine because she's a rare clairvoyant. They thought because the town was so isolated the girl would be safe, but they end up found out anyway and it turns into Witch Cowgirls vs. Witch/Warlock Nazis or something.

It sounds glorious!

I am thinking of picking up the idea gain (so I guess we would say that it was trunked, not shelved) but I'm kind of intimidated by the research and have no idea how to write something like this geared towards teenage girls.

Though I guess describing it it sounds more like a seinen than a YA novel.

edited 23rd Jul '11 9:29:59 AM by OhSoIntoCats

Mook Horror Show, The Story: It's gone through a couple of fandom incarnations and several different plotlines and even a universe made for it.

Basically, we take the usual Self Insertion story where you get all the girls and trash all the bad guys and we blow it up. A male main character is dropped In a World… with a significant population of both sexes that have superpowers of some sort. They are unreasoningly loved by every significant female character, to the point these characters try to rape them, and unreasoningly hated by every significant male one, to the point these characters try to murder them.

And the Main Character wants no part of any of it.

The clock's ticking. How long do they live?

Rarely do I ever consider my ideas "dead." Even if they haven't been worked on in years, I still often find a sliver of salvagability in them, so I'll hold onto them in private until such time as I can take advantage of it.

The only project I've had that I consider well and truly "dead" is not so because of disinterest. It's because its framework morphed and became a different project entirely.

It never had a solid name, but one of its more common ones was "ESP Academy." Basically, it was about an Extranormal Institute for children with psychic powers. The main character was named Alex, and for him, his discovery of his psychic powers happened to coincide painfully with him discovering some other details about himself. But his parents (for reasons revealed later) know of a place where they help psychic kids cope with themselves, which they then send him off too despite his protests (because it's in South America). He befriends a passel of psychics there, like Disk (real name Ichigo, and his eventual best friend; she astrally projects), Brock (psychically bolsters his strength), Blaze (been at the academy as long as she can remember; Cute Mute pyrokinetic), and Jason (can make other psychics stronger, and Alex's eventual Love Interest). Later on they discover that they're the result of an international governmental collaboration to create enhanced human fighters or somesuch, and Alex was the first "Born Psychic" (all the others were made psychic after birth). And the Academy's headmaster was evil.

Eventually, I think we realized it was quite cliche, so we came up with a less-cliche plot, turned the psychic powers into magic, turned the sexually-confused Alex into the openly-gay-but-damaged-in-other-ways Nick, and turned up the crazy to end up with the Wordkeepers project that's one of our hallmark "series."

I have an idea for a Space Opera that is teetering on the edge between "going to get flushed" and "going to get entirely reimagined to the point where it won't look nearly the same as it did only a year ago."

Oh, and my idea for Steampunk World War One started out as a video game idea, but I shut that down when the story got so big it made more sense as a book.

The first two settings I created, both of which I made before I was ten years old.

The first was based off the idea that all fiction becomes truth in its own separate world, and each of those worlds creates its own fiction that becomes true in another world. (I never did figure out what story our own world was based off of, though if I were to return to the setting, I'd probably say that Erwin Rommel was our protagonist.) Anyways, I never thought of a proper plotline for the setting.

In the second idea, the majority of the world's population succumbed to a sort of mass hallucination, in which they transformed into monsters and mythological beings and slowly forgot who they once were. The minority of remaining "humans" got a sort of double vision, and saw both the real world and the fantasy world, allowing them to do seemingly impossible things by utilizing elements of the real world. (I still want to use this setting for something, if only because it pointedly averted Humans Are Average, but I've long since discarded my original plot ideas for it.)

edited 23rd Jul '11 2:46:15 PM by feotakahari

uh the first series of stories i made. 10 in the main series, with more planned, and 3 offshoot series, 1 of them a trilogy, another a dualogy, and the 3rd supposed to progress alongside the mainseries and intertwine. along with that, there were at least 2 sidestories to the main series.

the original version of my current series of short stories was also a part of the previous series.

all of the above was dropped, after i became aware that the first story in the main series had a LOT of plotholes, and in doing that the rest of the stories just sorta fell apart, i lost confidence in the offshoot series, and the above mentioned original version of one of my current works was heavily altered because it was simply too damn dark.

id like to think i came back stronger though, with my current verse of stories, of which i only need 3 more stories to complete before the entire series has been fully planned.

i do deeply regret having to drop the 7th main story (and its direct sequels) though, because it was relatively plothole free, and i had put a lot more work into that particular story than any other, for some reason, and grown attached to the characters. ultimately, i dropped it because without the connections to the rest of the series, it simply seemed pointless.

edited 23rd Jul '11 5:05:03 PM by Tarsen

I've scrapped many a fanfic project, but the ones I remember the most were my Naruto fanfic ideas.

One was an AU (long before I even knew who all the Akatsuki were) where Neji joins the group to get revenge for his father's death. He ends up redeemed when Naruto fights and defeats him in a battle, and then he turns himself in, and is somehow spared execution.

The fanfic idea I had for Iruka's past was also scrapped, but I enjoyed it at the time I came up with it. I made his past a lot like Naruto's (where he was loud and obnoxious so he could get others to pay attention to him), but he had a teacher that was his favorite much like Iruka is Naruto's that he looked up to as a father figure.

Both ideas fell out of interest when I fell out of interest of the series. It's a shame too. They coulda been contenders.

I'm also thinking of scrapping my Red Dwarf projects as well. -sigh- As much as I love watching those guys, I can't capture their essence for much.

I've left out or changed a lot of individual scenes, and desided for not leave out the filler chapters (since I'm supposed to write 12 chapters and that would leave little room for filler). There's a few concepts that I've completely dropped, most of them pretty early on. Probably the most notable was the existance of a former goverment agency originally founded during the cold war to study the possibility of supernatural treaths that had since then gone rogue after having all of it's funding cut. Basically an expy of Delta Green. However, I didn't really figure how to involve that idea in the story so I dropped it.