Writers: share your story starts that went nowhere?

A man walked into a room, only to be met with the sound of shattered glass and a .308 to the forehead.

When I was a wee lad I dreamt up this storyline:
In the future, America’s crime has skyrocketed and the local police are forced to use bigger weapons (Rifles rather than pistols)
The Volunteer Police Force called the Guardians is a do-gooders club that tries to stop crime in the streets.
The Nhils are a radical satanic group and are the exact opposite of the Guardians. They want a political cleansing in America.
Thats it in a nutshell.

smokey the bear….. not so friendly…

Mine are mostly filled with great ideas for the middle/end but I always get caught up on a beginning. I’ve got a total fetish with subtle foreshadowing too so trying to do the beginning is a total nightmare in which I shortly give up and delete it all in frustration. :[

She shut down her computer, changed her shoes and left the office without saying a word to anyone – and had absolutely no idea where she was going.

A Two Crop Farm

My first real job —that is, the first job I ever got on my own where my parents weren’t hiring me and they didn’t help me get the job – was working on a dairy farm. The first summer I was there I ended up burning down about forty acres of hay on account of it was a really hot day, and when I smelled the smoke, I didn’t have the sense to stop the tractor I was driving until I was under a shade tree.

I don’t think this one is going anywhere. These are actual opening paragraphs. Nothing lies beyond but the void.

The Living Daylights

Tense as I was, I must have drifted off to sleep when I wasn’t looking, because the sounds of Earl crashing his way to bed in the dark jolted me awake.

“Shhh!” I hissed as loudly as I could without making any noise.

Earl thanked me by yelling. “Aaagh! Jejus Cripes, Sam, you scared the living daylights out of me!” A multitonal clap of thunder and a rattle of small glass objects meant that he had just collided with the dresser. “Oooaaw!” That was probably for his shin.

“Shhh, Earl, shut up, will you?” This was more like a low shout, but I was still trying to make a hiss of it. “Slow down and be quiet! There’s a baby sleeping in here.”

“A baby! Jiminy effing Christmas, what’s a baby—“

In the screenplay version of this, that’s the cue for the baby to wake up screaming so two klutzy bachelor brothers, one smart and nerdy and kind of helpless with life things, but cute, and one big and buff and half the time drunk but for some reason still always popular with women, could amusingly try to shush it while the parents in the audience shriek with laughter and the dating couples edge away from each other slightly. But angelic little Heidi slept on. One of the benefits of being born last of nine, I guess.

A final creaking thud and a major grunt told me Earl had finally reached his bed. I didn’t even hear the one-two thump of his shoes coming off before he started to snore.

What The Talking Drum Said

Derrick was long and slim and he lived in a squat with his brother and a talking drum. His brother, though older, was in pretty bad shape. The drum was in a bad mood and wouldn’t talk.

All of which meant that Derrick had a lot of responsibilities and no one to share them with, or even talk to about them. When Derrick couldn’t talk, he began to do crazy things. Not as crazy as his brother, but crazy enough.

Maybe he’d fuck it all and hit the road. You’d think being homeless’d give you freedom. Fuck no! Derrick had more responsibilities now than ever. He looked over at his brother, sacked out on the couch they’d dragged in off the street last month. Jamma was snoring. The talking drum was jammed into the cushions near his feet. Drum hadn’t said anything for a week. Not since the night he’d gotten in that fight with Lisa.

—-Ummmm—how many can I put here? There seem to be dozens. This one was started in 2003. As was the first one.—

(Hopes Rowling mentions Harry Potter)

Keep it up, @daloon! I have many, also, but some of them are so obscure that I hardly dare own them, and others—well, they still excite that little tickle of possibility and I’m not quite ready to give them up.

Here’s one that must have come out of a dream. I haven’t the faintest clue what it meant or what prompted it.

“‘Tis the will of the Lord,” said Granny Apple.
“Make lemonade!” said Granny Mitten.

That’s it.

You asked for it….

Only difference between them in first two months was she liked liver and he didn’t. He likes red licorice and she likes black.

He decided not to talk about relationship technology to her until she had moved into his place. He didn’t want her using the knowledge on Mark. He told her “love is a verb.” No body gets this. Everyone on the fucking planet thinks love is a noun. They hang around a person and start having physicial sensations, and then they say, “I love you.” And they think love is within. But after a while the feelings drop off, and they don’t know what happened to their love for them. “I told her love is not a noun, at all. All those feelings are symptoms. Love is a verb. Something you have to do. You don’t get to vote on whether you love your partner. It’s the receiver who gets to judge. Does your partner feel love out of their experience of you, and that’s how they decide if you really love them.”

I started one about a truck driver that had lost everything due to an ongoing feud with a particularly vengeful DOT officer. I had the beginning, and the ending, but the middle part just didn’t come.

Another was about two cows talking about being on a livestock truck, and headed for an as yet unknown destination. They thought they were special, to be onboard with several other cows, and they imagined all sorts of awesome destinations. The final destination was of course a slaughterhouse. I never got much past the first paragraph with that one; probably because my dialogue skills were rudimentary.

And of course the one about the guy who wakes up inside the metal coffin at the funeral place just as the gas jets fire up to cremate his body. That one stems from a major fear, and it creeps me out to think about it now. No wonder I couldn’t write it.

I have Leonardo da Vinci syndrome, I can start things but finishing them is the hard part. I even have a sci-fi novel that is over 300 pages long, but I couldn’t finish it because it involved killing off one of the main characters at the end. A character that I adored.

Oh, you want actual starts…How about this one?

The Epic Adventures of Tangor Bringerbinder

My name is Tangor Bringerbinder and this is my story. I notice the look of confusion on your face. You are thinking, what sort of name is Tangor Bringerbinder? Well, it is the sort of name that you have if you are a member of my family. I come from a long line of Bringerbinders. In some circles, it is a very well known name. Unfortunately, none of those circles are around here.
Throughout history the Bringerbinder name has appeared in many different periods. It was a Bringerbinder who sold the bundles of wood to the English when Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. It was a Bringerbinder who was one of the first people to hit the pavement after jumping out of his office window during the start of the Great Depression. It was a Bringerbinder who invented the first rear tine self-propelled garden tiller. It was a Bringerbinder who first figured out the Enigma code that Germany was using to send messages between its army generals and the Fuhrer during World War Two. And finally, it was a Bringerbinder who designed one of the first computer components back in the late nineteen forties…

This story goes on for another 70 pages or so, but I just can’t figure out how to end it. It has a love interest, a touch of history, a time machine, lots of weird ironic happenings, and plenty of silly nonsense. Just no decent ending.

It was a dark and stormy night.

MMM.. a Dark and Stormy = Black Rum and Ginger Beer…..

@evelyns_pet_zebra I got a number of crazy ones, too. Some of them are so dated. It’s funny reading them now. The thing that’s interesting to me is that so many of them are about issues I like to write about on fluther —God, the meaning of life, and all that.

You all are much farther along than I. Story ideas? Dozens. Actual beginnings? Not a one. Yet, I still delude myself into thinking “someday…”. Nope, I’m not quite ready to give them up. ;-)

Perhaps the wonder of incredible pain is that there is a bit of perfection at the heart of it. It was not exactly like being in another world but more of an utter certainty of action, though that is not quite right either. There I lay; I could do no other. Nothing in my head but marvel; my mind retreated to a corner of my being. No thoughts. Just sensation.

man, I want to edit this so much

So, are we going to comment about these starts? Make suggestions? Urge people to move further or drop them? Is there any point to this other than to brag about how ineffective we are as writers?

Sure there is. It’s like a rummage sale for fiction. The point is that my dead-in-the-water start might be an inspiration to you and yours to me. There they are, free for the taking. They fell on fallow soil with us, but maybe by scattering them we will let them find a fertile spot to take root in.

Question details:
Those DOA story starters: what if they were a lightning bolt of animation to someone else’s imagination? If you know you’re not going to do anything with one of yours, want to share it right here and see if someone else can use it?

It’s not a story line, but it is a line for a song of poem. I wrote it in a journal about 25 years ago, thinking I would use it, and it just stood there:

” A gambler who wins every time will live a life of hell.”