When an idea turns bad.

My friends always cringe a bit when I fire out I have an idea. I’m the kind of person who wants his ideas to roam free, test evolution, see if they thrive in my friendly confines, or else get hunted down and killed for their weaknesses. The problem with what I do is sometimes I put them out there too soon, before the ideas can really walk on their own. They are then sitting ducks for doubt and misunderstanding. They might have been fine if I let them mature a bit more in my imagination before releasing them into the wild.

I was worried that’s what happened to an idea I had for a series of shorts that I want to shoot someday. I wanted to look how someone’s position could be changed by just making them a little bit different than anyone else. That change would seem cool on the surface, but underneath there is a major downside to it. I then wanted to see how that person copes with it in a daily life. You could say this is a lot like Spiderman in that respect, but the person wouldn’t have nearly that much power. Anyhow, people I threw the idea at liked it a lot and I went to put it down in an outline. I outlined roughly three episodes and then showed that around and guess what, it flopped, same character, same idea, but total blah. Even when I read it I thought it was all wrong. I put it away and chalked up to another death in the real world.

I pulled it back out yesterday, and while it still flops, the idea of the main character still excites me. It was something that made others happy as well. I think I know what happened. The situation the character was put in utterly failed. It was too cute, too perfect. I think my character needs to live in a less perfect world, something more realistic. Maybe that’s part of what’s wrong with some stories/movies. They live in too perfect of places. Yes there is plot, but our main character is perfectly suited for the plot, they just don’t know it yet. Maybe someone should write a plot where the hero is suited at all for it, but manages to just get it done. That would be someone I could identify with. Of course, maybe that’s why I like the movie Hero (Dustin Hoffman) so much.