Ideas are Vapors in My Mind

Fairyhedgehog posted about avid reading on her blog. The post is HERE. I commented on the post, bragging about my ability to come up with thousands of story ideas - without actually having written them.

Now I find myself wondering how much of an exaggeration - or minimization - that was. How many story ideas do I come up with in a day anyway? Not how many do I write. Writing a story can take ten, twenty or even a hundred times as long as reading it.

But last year I managed to write a lot. Including poems (which in my case are very short stories) I wrote 111 projects, finishing 97. That's about a story idea every four days. But how many ideas do I actually come up with? And coming up with ideas - does it prove anything? What?

I think I may begin a journal of story ideas I come up with this year. Since it looks like I'm not going to be able to write nearly as much as I desire I will be regulated to imagination only. It's a fun place to be, but it's hard to revisit ideas and enjoy them the same as before.

And should I include story ideas I have that I haven't started? How do I go about tracking this I wonder? I have no misgivings whatsoever about predicting at least 500 story ideas over the course of a year. I might even be able to double that. Talk about bold, huh? But coming up with an idea is easy. Writing it is HARD. Time consuming. It's hard for the work to keep up with the ideas. And when better ideas show up work often stops.

How about you? Do you come up with a lot of ideas - but fail to actually write them? How many do you get? How many do you actually try to write?

What Makes a Bad Story

One thing I hate about modern storytelling is the apparent need to hammer some social message into the reader/viewer. They (someone) have taken perfectly fine old stories from my childhood and changed them, adding messages where no message was intended. Removing slapstick because some a*shole finds it offensive. Well, what about the cr*p they spew out? I find it offensive.

The original Charlie Brown cartoons were about Charlie Brown failing. That was the endearing quality of the strip. And Charles Schultz made a lot of social statements in the process. He just couched them in satire instead of syrupy gloop which offends even young people. The later cartoons had Charlie Brown actually winning a baseball game. That seems sacrilege to me.

They remade a Tom and Jerry cartoon and had the characters talk, or so I was told. When I heard that I wouldn't see the movie. Tom and Jerry were only allowed to make sound when in pain. Then they got to scream. I'm sorry, but it was funny.

Lord of the Rings was a great book, but it wasn't about the race of men proving anything. It was about a world going through a transition from one way of life to another, and what it took for it to happen. Peter Jackson made a good movie, but he ruined the story.

It seems the powers that be have determined that modern readers insist on this dribble, and so they continue to put out substandard product. The truth is, the best works of fiction have no agenda - beyond telling a story.

That social commentary will be made is inevitable. However, when said commentary is done as part of the backwash of a story, as opposed to being the story, the commentary is accepted as natural, like the sound of water splashing at an old mill next to a river. When the commentary is the story, it's like this poorly made western I saw. They were in the desert hills of Arizona, and what is in the background? The songs of marsh birds. And whenever anyone would shoot and miss, hitting the sandy ground, we would hear ricochets.

That's what social commentary stories are to me. Cr*p. I'm not against social commentary. But it makes for terrible stories.