What is the worst possible premise that you can come up with for a story. Stupidest, weirdest, most unwritable? What you got?

Anything anyone comes up with, there is probably at least one person who will take it as a challenge.

1. Deeply ordinary Joe finds himself contemplating his life and finding himself through the power of self-reflection. Involves a lot of sitting on park benches and staring wistfully into the rain. Occasionally both at once. The story ends with Joe resolving his internal crises and realising he is human. 

It turns out the whole story was a metaphor for a completely different real MC, Susan, who had to resolve her own crises through a surrogate imaginary creation, and the whole book took place while she imagined it on a different park bench in the rain.

2. Thinly-veiled political manifesto with a sociopathic main character who is always Right and Justified when they’re the one being the tyrant and the righteous opponent of Evil™ when someone else is being the tyrant. No one in this world understands the concept of empathy. There is only Fight. 

All sides spend the entire book kicking puppies but we know we’re supposed to cheer when the main character does it. All the women get raped by the villains for no reason and then immediately all fall for the main character and become his harem providing him with sexual favours, also for no reason. Unless they’re ugly, in which case they get killed by the villains and the main character doesn’t particularly notice. 

3. Three-book long series of extended training scenes and war games whose only purpose is to improve the main character’s strategic skills without those skills ever having any impact on anything material. The MC is now a strategic genius who has had precisely zero impact on the world except to inspire others to be like him and also become strategic geniuses in artificially-restricted tournament conditions who solve no real-world problems. 

The kicker is it’s not a sports story but a high fantasy set in the middle of a brutal war. Most of the strategy involves increasingly fancy ways to hit people with swords despite the fact magic is common, and the war ends before any of the trainees are ever deployed to the battlefield.

I'm a firm believer that any premise can be written well by the right author, but here we go... 

1) A re-writing of Robin Hood. The whole story is a great, heroic and faithful re-telling of the fable, complete with the moral of fighting tyrants and supporting the weak, up until the very end... when the author turns out to have a fetish for violence. Yes, the whole story up till now was just a set-up for the authors kink. Everyone suddenly falls asleep and wakes up in a sex dungeon. It turns out King John drugged all their mead or whatever and we only found out after the fact. Don't read this shit anymore, unless you're into the most plotless, violent, unimaginative and infinite revenge porn imaginable. The end. 

2) A tyrant got dumped by his girlfriend after he was being a total creep, but he refused to admit he was wrong so in his anger he commits a bunch of genocides. Because of this, after millions die, the world realize he's pitiful and all the women feel sorry for him that he got dumped. In the end, the world loves him for absolutely no reason and all the women ever are standing in line to have sex with him. He is hailed a hero after he humiliates his girlfriend on an episode of Dr. Phil. 

Csuite Wrote: 1. Deeply ordinary Joe finds himself contemplating his life and finding himself through the power of self-reflection. Involves a lot of sitting on park benches and staring wistfully into the rain. Occasionally both at once. The story ends with Joe resolving his internal crises and realising he is human. 

It turns out the whole story was a metaphor for a completely different real MC, Susan, who had to resolve her own crises through a surrogate imaginary creation, and the whole book took place while she imagined it on a different park bench in the rain.

2. Thinly-veiled political manifesto with a sociopathic main character who is always Right and Justified when they’re the one being the tyrant and the righteous opponent of Evil™ when someone else is being the tyrant. No one in this world understands the concept of empathy. There is only Fight. 

All sides spend the entire book kicking puppies but we know we’re supposed to cheer when the main character does it. All the women get raped by the villains for no reason and then immediately all fall for the main character and become his harem providing him with sexual favours, also for no reason. Unless they’re ugly, in which case they get killed by the villains and the main character doesn’t particularly notice. 

3. Three-book long series of extended training scenes and war games whose only purpose is to improve the main character’s strategic skills without those skills ever having any impact on anything material. The MC is now a strategic genius who has had precisely zero impact on the world except to inspire others to be like him and also become strategic geniuses in artificially-restricted tournament conditions who solve no real-world problems. 

The kicker is it’s not a sports story but a high fantasy set in the middle of a brutal war. Most of the strategy involves increasingly fancy ways to hit people with swords despite the fact magic is common, and the war ends before any of the trainees are ever deployed to the battlefield.

You're Number 1 is the movie Tully, basically. Spoilers I guess.

A dude became the chosen one because of a cheat book, or a cheat sword, or a god. One day the arrogant boy who always bullied him came to bully him some more. Chosen one finally beat him up, so the arrogant boy cried, and then his bodyguard came to challenge the chosen one. He too gets beaten up. So arrogant boy's older brother came to beat the chosen one and he too gets beaten up. Then the father, then the uncle, then the grandfather, then the grandfather's employer's bodyguard, then the grandfather's employer's son, then his grandfather's employer's son's older brother, then the employer himself, then the employer's father, then the employer's father's brother, then the employer's father's employer, and on and on and on until the end of time.


I'm sure no one will try and write something like this... 

Well, I ain't gonna name names or nothing, but it would involve a certain adorable doc around here, and of course a duck. 😸

First idea: A story that follows a group of kids, that attend a school or academy. Occasionally there's light drama, arguments, or comedy. But mostly, nothing happens. 99% of the story is inside the classroom. 

Second idea: A story that follows a woman whose sole purpose in life is to sacrifice as many of her kids as possible to demons. She tries hard to get pregnant as quickly as possible, and then 9 months later sacrifices her newborns at the altar. This grants her eternal youth; she's been doing it for hundreds of years already.  

Ararara Wrote: A story that follows a group of kids. That attend a school or academy. Occasionally there's light drama, arguments, or comedy. But mostly, nothing happens. 99% of the story is inside the classroom.

And most of the classroom scenes is just a really bad math teacher doing a really boring job of trying to teach kid algebra. 

Ararara Wrote: Second idea: A story that follows a woman whose sole purpose in life is to sacrifice as many of her kids as possible to demons. She tries hard to get pregnant as quickly as possible, and then 9 months later sacrifices her newborns at the altar. This grants her eternal youth; she's been doing it for hundreds of years already.

Is it bad that I kinda wanna write this?

Cinn Wrote:

Ararara Wrote: Second idea: A story that follows a woman whose sole purpose in life is to sacrifice as many of her kids as possible to demons. She tries hard to get pregnant as quickly as possible, and then 9 months later sacrifices her newborns at the altar. This grants her eternal youth; she's been doing it for hundreds of years already.

Is it bad that I kinda wanna write this?

No, it's not, that's the opposite of a bad premise! I have my hands full of my own projects but that prompt might just be a future candidate...  

I'm rooting for the paladins in this one for sure. 

Stuff happens to people that frankly, even I, the author, don't care about.

Llamadragon Wrote:

Cinn Wrote:

Ararara Wrote: Second idea: A story that follows a woman whose sole purpose in life is to sacrifice as many of her kids as possible to demons. She tries hard to get pregnant as quickly as possible, and then 9 months later sacrifices her newborns at the altar. This grants her eternal youth; she's been doing it for hundreds of years already.

Is it bad that I kinda wanna write this?

No, it's not, that's the opposite of a bad premise! I have my hands full of my own projects but that prompt might just be a future candidate...  

I'm rooting for the paladins in this one for sure.

I second this. That premise is metal af.

StgBria Wrote:

Llamadragon Wrote:

Cinn Wrote:

Ararara Wrote: Second idea: A story that follows a woman whose sole purpose in life is to sacrifice as many of her kids as possible to demons. She tries hard to get pregnant as quickly as possible, and then 9 months later sacrifices her newborns at the altar. This grants her eternal youth; she's been doing it for hundreds of years already.

Is it bad that I kinda wanna write this?

No, it's not, that's the opposite of a bad premise! I have my hands full of my own projects but that prompt might just be a future candidate...  

I'm rooting for the paladins in this one for sure.

I second this. That premise is metal af.

Mc hides away in her little evil corner of the world but eventually decides to break into a church family record archive, attempting to find men whose bloodlines have a history of twins and triplets. Gets caught, has to run from the people who'd REALLY like to kill her, and we all root for the witchhunters for this one, waiting for the moment someone will FINALLY kill this bitch. 

A nice inversion of the trope where the characters struggle for survival and we hope they survive. 

Audience: "Damnit, they ALMOST got her this time!" 

Edit: Title it something like "Place your bets on when she dies" just to play the trope

I'd submit that the story has to have the lowest steaks possible, the lowest movement possible, the least change possible, with a boring character. As, those things in the reverse are kind of the things that make stories good.

So, Depressed NEET, who does nothing. He isn't upset about doing nothing, but isn't happy to be doing it either. He doesn't talk to anyone, past routine small talk, on a regular interval (better if the conversation is the exact same every time.) Nothing interesting is going on around him. He's non imaginative, so he doesn't have a rich inner world either. He makes no movies to alter the situation, and no outside source pushes change either.  He's depressed so he's emotionally deadened, to the point of numbness. Do the same chapter, with slight word variations.

He simply exists, in the same space, doing the same things, none of these things is allowed to be interesting, or have potential for growth. He probably eats the same three squares of bland stuff, has his food delivered, and so on and so on.

That's the best I got.

Llamadragon Wrote: Mc hides away in her little evil corner of the world but eventually decides to break into a church family record archive, attempting to find men whose bloodlines have a history of twins and triplets. Gets caught, has to run from the people who'd REALLY like to kill her, and we all root for the witchhunters for this one, waiting for the moment someone will FINALLY kill this bitch. 

A nice inversion of the trope where the characters struggle for survival and we hope they survive. 

Audience: "Damnit, they ALMOST got her this time!" 

Edit: Title it something like "Place your bets on when she dies" just to play the trope

Damn, you already did this better than I ever could. 🤣

Llamadragon Wrote:

StgBria Wrote:

Llamadragon Wrote:

Cinn Wrote:

Ararara Wrote: Second idea: A story that follows a woman whose sole purpose in life is to sacrifice as many of her kids as possible to demons. She tries hard to get pregnant as quickly as possible, and then 9 months later sacrifices her newborns at the altar. This grants her eternal youth; she's been doing it for hundreds of years already.

Is it bad that I kinda wanna write this?

No, it's not, that's the opposite of a bad premise! I have my hands full of my own projects but that prompt might just be a future candidate...  

I'm rooting for the paladins in this one for sure.

I second this. That premise is metal af.

Mc hides away in her little evil corner of the world but eventually decides to break into a church family record archive, attempting to find men whose bloodlines have a history of twins and triplets. Gets caught, has to run from the people who'd REALLY like to kill her, and we all root for the witchhunters for this one, waiting for the moment someone will FINALLY kill this bitch. 

A nice inversion of the trope where the characters struggle for survival and we hope they survive. 

Audience: "Damnit, they ALMOST got her this time!" 

Edit: Title it something like "Place your bets on when she dies" just to play the trope

until the very end when the plot twist comes and reveals that all her Children are fated to be Monsters who would end the world but her 1000th child would bring salvation. So she would need to stay alive long enough to deliver it to bring peace to all worlds

CILinkzSpre3 Wrote:

Llamadragon Wrote:

StgBria Wrote:

Llamadragon Wrote:

Cinn Wrote:

Ararara Wrote: Second idea: A story that follows a woman whose sole purpose in life is to sacrifice as many of her kids as possible to demons. She tries hard to get pregnant as quickly as possible, and then 9 months later sacrifices her newborns at the altar. This grants her eternal youth; she's been doing it for hundreds of years already.

Is it bad that I kinda wanna write this?

No, it's not, that's the opposite of a bad premise! I have my hands full of my own projects but that prompt might just be a future candidate...  

I'm rooting for the paladins in this one for sure.

I second this. That premise is metal af.

Mc hides away in her little evil corner of the world but eventually decides to break into a church family record archive, attempting to find men whose bloodlines have a history of twins and triplets. Gets caught, has to run from the people who'd REALLY like to kill her, and we all root for the witchhunters for this one, waiting for the moment someone will FINALLY kill this bitch. 

A nice inversion of the trope where the characters struggle for survival and we hope they survive. 

Audience: "Damnit, they ALMOST got her this time!" 

Edit: Title it something like "Place your bets on when she dies" just to play the trope

until the very end when the plot twist comes and reveals that all her Children are fated to be Monsters who would end the world but her 1000th child would bring salvation. So she would need to stay alive long enough to deliver it to bring peace to all worlds

Hey now, no redeeming arcs in my righteous vengeance. 

The day-by-day account of an elderly woman's goldfish.

Manners and hospitality aren't merely niceties in the land of Hurrel, they're the law. Grelton had just wanted to live a quiet live, but when his father refused to invite members of an invading army to dinner, his family's name was ruined. His only chance of erasing his outcast status was to join the Krelt, Hurrel's elite corps of politeness police. The training covered every imaginable situation, from picking up dropped handkerchiefs, using the correct spoon for tea, holding doors open, and of course how to courteously arrest an impolite suspect. As he nears graduation from the training academy, Grelton begins to suspect that not all is as it seems. Beneath his people's drive for a polite society, there lurks a dark secret, one that will make Grelton doubt everything's he's ever known. Now he had a choice to make; abandon the manners he'd been taught his entire life, or speak out of turn in the vain hope of saving his people.