Ideas that don’t work

Recently, I had the idea for a scene where a 1950’s scifi writer was telling his agent about his latest novel.  It was set in that far off year of 2024, and told of the beginning of a robot rebellion.  The idea behind it was, while all the technology was wrong, parts of this robot rebellion sounds a lot like what people fear will happen when the AIs take over. 

It was a nice little scene, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.  I eventually had the idea of this writer getting sucked to now, and he is amazed with how far we’ve come in some areas, smartphones, but disappointed in how little we’ve done, like, where are the Mars colonies?  At first, this seemed like an interesting idea.  He ends up with a granddaughter who is trying to finish and update some of the stories left behind when he mysteriously disappeared, and she has to beat the casual misogyny and racism out of him. 

I can’t remember if I had the first idea while I was driving to work, or while doing my mind-numbing day job, but I wrote the basics down in my writing notebook during my lunch break.  But I kept thinking about it when I went back to work, and that’s when things started to unravel.  Basically, everything was to have this grounded reality, but then there was this random time portal that … threw everything off.  I don’t know how long I thought about it, or how many little changes I made to try to get the story to work.  And when I finally had something that might work, I realized that it little to do with the original idea of a robot/AI rebellion, which had been the whole point. 

I have a whole folder of Dead Stories.  Some are just ideas I quickly figured out weren’t going to work, but others I didn’t figure out weren’t going to work until they were half-finished.  And I know that all the time spent writing – even work on Dead Stories – is still writing exercises that help future writing projects, but sometimes I wish I could put out a collection of my half-finished Dead Stories and people would be curious enough to buy it.  I mean, it is late stage capitalism, I need to monetize everything just to squeak by.  Say, have you checked out my most recent collection, The Uncapped Pen?