This question has been floating around my head: Has anyone ever been given an absolutely asinine and rock-stupid premise, scenario, or idea for a story or plot and told to make something good out out of it? The situation where such a challenge arises could be a creative writing class (with a particularly sadistic instructor), a job (with your future employment possibly on the line), a dare or bet among your writer friends, or even a trap you inflict on yourself to test your creative muscles. I’m curious whether any writers have come across any exercises like this.
Also, even if you haven’t experienced anything like this, have you ever encountered a creative work that seemed, in your opinion, to have been a product of such a challenge?
This used to be (probably still is) a standard part of basic journalism courses. Students are handed a piece of paper with a bunch of disconnected facts and told to turn it into a coherent news story. I not only did it in journalism school but did the same thing as a writing test for a job.
A reverse example was the 1969 novel Naked Came the Stranger. A group of writers came together with the goal of writing a salacious but stupid novel as a protest against all the salacious, stupid novels that became best sellers. The novel had to be heavily edited because some of the collaborative couldn’t write badly enough.
Jim Butcher’s Codex Alara series resulted from him asserting that an author could make a good book based on a bad premise, and one of his friends challenging him to combine Pokemon with the Roman Legion.
I’ve been meaning to read it; I’ve heard it’s quite good.
Yes. In both writing and graphics, though my experience in writing is with nonfiction only, so I can’t speak to novels, etc. Graphics was worse - typically when I encountered this, it was someone giving me something that had been used for years and photocopied about 100 times, and they wanted a better copy. You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit - I told them I could indeed make a better copy, but that would require redrawing the thing, which wasn’t something that was going to happen in 15 minutes. You all know the adage - good, fast, cheap. Pick two. As for writing, there’s bad writing and then bad editing. Sometimes just editing is enough. Sometimes you’re back to the chicken shit stage and you need to start over.
In literary circles, there’s Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. Maxwell Perkins saw promise in the hot mess that came across how desk and worked extensively with Wolfe to bring it up to snuff.
The 2011 video game Homefront was pitched as being a modern Red Dawn but featuring China as the new invaders of America and was even suppose to be written by Red Dawn writer John Milius.
Then at some point (much like the Red Dawn movie remake itself) they switched the antagonists from China to North Korea (so they could sell it in China) and now had to messily write a long confusing reason for North Korea to suddenly have the ability to invade America. Unlike the Red Dawn remake which they just did post-production to make all the Chinese flags North Korea and “justified” it by having North Korea just be a part of a new Russian invasion of America, the Homefront developers had to basically throw out all of John Milius original script and just write their own weird story of North Korea unifying with South Korea, then invading Japan and Indonesia and somehow creating a Southeast Asia superpower with all that new manpower.
They did their best justifying all of it, but it’s pretty obvious with the narrative leaps they had to make to explain why the North Korea army suddenly outnumbers the American army, they really had to stretch their premise to the breaking point.
When I was in 8th grade (circa 1965), in Social Studies class we had a unit on propaganda: We learned about several distinct kinds of propaganda styles (something like the types of “logical fallacies” one learns about in Critical Thinking classes, which is essentially what this unit was).
Then we had a writing assignment: To write an overtly blatant propaganda piece arguing for our choice of one of these propositions:
[ul][li] Boys are the best sex.[/li][li] Boys are the worst sex.[/li][li] Girls are the best sex.[/li][li] Girls are the worst sex.[/ul][/li]I was (and still am) quite confident that my essay was convincing.
when i was in hs this exercise was called "putting someones work into your own words " i was very good at it as many people who made it through hs with my assistance can attest to
Pretty minor, but… I went to college as an adult and graduated when I was 40. In an English class we were given basic assignments such as write a comparison/contrast theme, etc. When it came time for the descriptive theme most classmates wrote short, dull, well, descriptions.
I wrote an essay called “The Singer” about Pat Benatar’s first Cleveland concert as I experienced it from the highest seats in Cleveland’s Music Hall. The teacher read it to the class and took me aside afterwards and confided in me that she hoped I would become a writer. I remarked, “I’m studying engineering”.
Anyway, she had me sign a release for the rights to publish it in a textbook on creative writing she was working on. I have no idea if it ever came to pass. I still have a copy around here. When I re-read it a few years ago I decided it was a bit giddy.
When I was in college taking English composition, we had to write 500 word “theme” every week on an assigned topic. One week the topic was chewing gum. What can you say interesting about chewing gum in 500 words. I have no memory what I did, except that my father helped.
My daughter is a scientific editor. Every once in a while she will get a paper of undoubted scientific importance but whose author’s command of English is quite deficient and she has essentially to rewrite it. She has a scientific background and can mostly do it, but sometimes it feels like polishing a turd.
Not “creative” works but I’ve been asked to do “polishing” of crap.
E.g., I was reviewing a draft of some chapters of a planned textbook for a publisher. (Publishers and I had an interesting relationship back then. They wanted me to really, really write a book on my specialty. So they got to know me and I got to know some of them.) I could make some nice change for a few days work.
It was garbage. Horrible stuff. Got a lot of basic stuff wrong over and over. So I told them to can it and move it. No, they didn’t want to do that. Would I edit it? Even more money was dangled.
No. It would be a completely rewritten book and I would only be listed as editor while some other clod was nominally “the author”. They went ahead. It was bad. No real polishing.
And I’ve seen the before and after versions of other texts. Yeah, I can spot one that had serious rework done on it. Of course sometimes the “polishing” was done by a non-expert and things get worse rather than better.
Well-known DJ Murray the K bet Bobby Darin that he couldn’t write a song that began with the words “Splish splash, I was taking a bath”. So he did. Not exactly a great song, but it was a big hit in 1958.
I can’t say I’ve ever encountered it personally, but the famous Kevin Smith monologue about working on a Superman script as the producer makes more and more asinine demands seems close.
The infamous Disney Song of the South was apparently like this- Walt was getting tons of resistance to the idea, and decided it was the Hollywood communists that was causing the problems. (This was just before the blacklist) His solution was to hire the most prominent openly communist screenwriter in Hollywood to work on the script. Even his best efforts couldn’t make it progressive, though he claims it was his rewrite that changed the time period from pre-war to reconstruction.
