On That Scifi Concept Of Mine Someone Is Probably Going To ‘Steal’ And Develop

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I vacillate back and forth between panicking that someone’s going to use that crude scifi first act scene summary I wrote to write a screenplay and wondering why that would be all that bad for me, in the long run.

There are three major reasons why I put that scifi concept aside in favor of what I’m working on now.

First, it was all conceit.
I could never figure out any characters, so I kept writing and re-writing the scene summary. The concept was amazingly great, but it was all concept and no characters.

Second, I didn’t have the resources.
The universe I constructed around that scifi novel was so enormous that only about eight or more books would have properly given it the treatment it needed. And the better storyteller I became, the more I realize the internal logic of a novel, as opposed to a movie, demanded I learned a huge amount about a lot of topics that I barely knew more than a Wikipedia entry’s worth of information about.

Third, where it was set.
I wanted to write a really personal story about the general area where I grew up and the more I worked on the project, the more I realized I probably needed to set it somewhere different. By doing that, of course, I would probably be set back months, if not years, as I learned enough about the geography of the new place.

Regardless, the point is it’s very possible some hack is using that crude scene summary I posted during the process of developing that original scifi novel to write a screenplay. It will hurt if they do that, but I would like to think somehow, someway, my connection to that product might garner some attention and help my career long-term.

Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

Leave a Reply