Ever felt embarrassed by your ideas?

You are a terrible person. But better than Tattl.

Most of my ideas seem to fall under Audience-Alienating Premise, because "it isn't as grimdark as it sounds" or "I have something specific in mind, it just doesn't fit well into conventional plot structures" or something else along similar lines.

A problem I've encountered, that I suspect not many tropers will be familiar with, is writing a genre foreign to my nation's culture. For example, I have a steampunk book in Development Hell, but the catch is: I'm Brazilian. Brazil has absolutely zero tradition in the steampunk genre, and trying to describe what it is to normal people is like trying to describe colors to a blind person. This makes my job very difficult.

...The only way I can describe my most recent idea is "Kill Bill set in the pre-colonial Philippines. (The Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Philippines, but still.)"

edited 15th Mar '15 4:26:43 PM by Sharysa

Well, right now I'm writing a story that is Conan with furries. (I don't mean like an adaptation of Conan like Disney's Robin Hood, I mean a Conan knock off) It's meant to be like a B-movie, except a webcomic. The more I write it, the more I am skeptical about sharing about it with other people.

Sort of.

There were times when I was embarrassed by how badly I'd managed to mangle the initial idea. And there were times when I'd felt embarrassed by having to show it to people myself rather than just letting them see it (those who have ever recited their own poetry to people in a contest know the feeling).

But I've been in enough "let's throw all the random ideas out into open space because we need one that actually works" to be inured to embarrassment from ideas themselves.

Mind you, it might have happened to me in the distant past (like, 15–20 years ago), but I do not remember it being the case right now so I can neither confirm nor deny the possibility.

Oh, wait ... I do have a draft of a love letter I wrote when I was 9. That kind of counts ... maybe ... I don't know, if a friend had known about it (never came up, and I don't mind telling people it exists) and asked me to show it then I probably wouldn't have any problems with it, but I'd rather people who aren't on that level with me never saw it.

edited 15th Apr '15 11:26:03 AM by Kazeto

I was embarrassed about an entire fanfiction that I wrote. I dumped its butt.

Porn. Sometimes I write more of it than the other stuff. At one point I decided I would write a mock ending in the most horrific way possible to test my limits. I was digusted with it despite the fact it was me who came up with it.

No.

Seriously, no; I'm embarrassed of nothing I've written. There is a bunchnI won't publish because it's bad. But that's just it being bad, not embarrassing.

Besides, any idea that embarrasses you can easily be converted to a crackfic, or even an awesomefic; case in point with a prototypical 40k fic becoming Commissar Sergei visiting the Video Game Multiverse.

Don't be embarrassed. Be amused. And use that amusement to make the mbarrassing awesome.

After seeing two sisters at a con who were dressed up as Foxy and Deadpool, I now want to learn enough about both franchises to run with their idea of "Deadpool now runs Freddy's".

The stuff I have actually written, I'm only embarassed about in an Old Shame kind of way. When it comes to the stuff that just runs through my head, however, there's quite a bit that will never be written down or spoken, because it's that weird/criminal/insane, and I'd rather not get booted from my job for mental reasons. Even the ones I could write down, I'm not going to, mostly because I don't think I could turn them into an enjoyable story with a Villain Protagonist when the villain revels in their evil deeds.