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[VolcanoQueen]

I come up with a lot of weird ideas in my head that I want to use for games or stories. I'm not sure why or how, but those ideas almost always evolve into things that are weird to the point that I can't think of any way for them to make sense in context. I really want to use some of these ideas, because they're really interesting, but I could use some advice. I also have no idea if this is the right place for this, or if this should be moved.

[Loud Whispers]

Without knowing what the idea is, the easiest way to make a weird idea sound sensible is to provide context for it. This is how for example, Socrates introduces all the weird ideas about how his Republic Utopia would work. He acknowledge the ideas were weird, but in proposing them, thinking about them and having the self-awareness of their weirdness, a weird idea is made normal

[Egan_BW]

Give a mostly-understandable hook, then drag your audience down into madness.

(Honestly though, most of the time I'm looking for weird stuff. Making it should too normal runs the risk of boring crazy people like me.)

[Harry Baldman]

If it's for games or stories, you can always root them into existing settings to shore them up. Even just do straight-up fanfic.

[Reelya]

Maybe the "life advice" section? You can move a thread (control in the bottom left I think), but make sure to turn off the thing that leaves a note that it's moved. smf leaving phantom threads defeats the purpose.
 
Breaking things down is a good skill. e.g. one of the things they taught us in my gamedev course was about pitching projects.

e.g. work out how to write an elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is a super-short explanation of what your thing is and why it's special. It should be no more than 20-30 seconds, and cover all the important stuff in passing.

Don't get stuck on irrelevant details.

e.g. one guy at my course when i ask him to explain what his game idea is would explain it a little like this (paraphrasing):

it's about a kingdom, and the king's name is Barry, he has green eyes, and his favorite food is peanut butter. BTW did I mention he has a really cool greatsword, well anyway, he's fighting against this evil Darknight. And the Darkknight's girlfriend is called Samantha. Samantha works as a barista, actually, and she makes really good Soy Lattes. Did you know that soy Lattes originated in ... ? Anyway, in the world of my game there are seven spheres of magic, one of them is the Sphere of Cheese, and the Sphere of Cheese consists of severals sub-spheres including Cheddar. Cheddar Magic allows you to summon mice, but only grey mice, and only on the full moon. On other days, you can summon other types of mice, e.g. white mice. But you need a Secondary Cheese from a related sphere for that. But white mice can't use the "squeak attack" unless you give then the "Boon" ability from the Corpus Magistratum, and you can't get the Corpus Magistratum unless you complete the Seven Quests of the Ninja Lords

^ don't be that guy, basically.

One idea is explaining things in "spirals". first, you have your elevator pitch, which should be 20 seconds, 1-2 sentences, and it touches on each of the key things your game/story/movie etc is trying to do. Then, the second pass is 1-2 paragraphs. It elaborates on each of the things in the elevator pitch, while briefly hinting about any new details that are relevant. Then the third pass is where you have one full paragraph explaining each core area in detail. Basically, the idea of explaining things in "spirals" is to touch each core topic over and over, but in a way that elaborates rather than repeats yourself. In each iteration, things from the previous iteration become more fleshed out, while any new topics are introduced (but as their own elevator pitch level concepts). The core skill you learn from this process is leaving out things that aren't important, which also helps you clarify what is important to yourself. you could practice writing this kind of treatment for a movie, e.g. Star Wars or something else well known.

This concept of iterating an explanation is that if your cut off, you haven't failed to introduce any important concepts, since you front-loaded what's important at the start, and the explanation is also fractal, e.g. if someone asks for more detail on any one aspect, you have notes ready to go, explaining that feature, any only that feature, without distractions. So you can drill down to what interests people more easily than with a monolithic idea.

Basically, never expect people to read some shitty "backstory" before they can "get" your game. Nobody cares about the backstory until after you sold then on how the game works. e.g. imagine explaining Kratos's entire life story to an investor, before explaining what the player actually does in God of War. Unfortunately, this is how many "game writers" approach things. nobody cares about the backstory unless they're already sold on how the game plays. Basically, when pitching a game with detailed lore, explain the game itself very clearly and just say "... and we have a comprehensive world of lore created that the players can enjoy discovering". don't bore collaborators with "world history" and bullshit like that. They don't need or want to know how many moons the planet has.

[nenjin]

Well for one thing get that damn squid out of your mouth.

[NJW2000]

Well, here's a different approach often used in fiction.

 Start with the weird idea, don't show it to anyone, run with it for a bit creating more content. Let it grow it's own context. Then show people the content you've produced, not the original idea.

e.g. if you want to describe a planet where magical power is in inverse proportion to emotion, with a similarly new and quirky political system, culture, species, etc etc, DON'T always summarise these things in an information-rich introduction, BUT try writing a few epics set in a particular bit of the planet. That way people will engage with the ultra-weird ideas by thinking about them a lot and arriving at the really odd stuff gradually, which is presumably how you arrived at them if you find them weird, even if you have a very weird mind.

People being entirely sure what's going on isn't always a good thing, but of course they have to at least think they're getting it. Some people have higher tolerances for not-getting it than others, of course.

This is all very abstract, but it's quite hard to tell exactly what kind of ideas you're referring to without seeing something.

[Reelya]

Good points, writing stories showcasing parts of the whole is better than info-dumps any day.

Basically, you want a glimpse of the bigger whole, but like the "noodle incident" it is in fact better to be mysterious rather than overload on details. Let the audience/readers imagination fill in the details. The reader's own imagination is often overlooked by new fiction writers, but it's one of your best assets. I'm guessing that's because some people who like "world building" want to control all the details, but being overly detail-oriented doesn't give the reader so much leeway to envision things themselves. The reader has a finite amount of attention to give your work, make sure that attention is spent on the important things. It's a balance: if your richly detail a character's room to give a better picture of who they are (which ultimately is the only reason it matters) then you need to sacrifice detail on something else you deem less important: otherwise, the time spent detailing that room could have been spent describing something else about that world.

[EnigmaticHat]

Have an elevator pitch.  For most things, the elevator pitch's purpose is to signal what the story is similar to.  So if you describe it as, I don't know, "an FPS with crafting elements" or "a story that blends fantasy and alternate history" people will know about what you mean.  Should be under two sentences, points to hit are genre and core conflict.  The core conflict being the basic issue that the player/main character has to resolve.  So Left 4 Dead is, at its core, a game about escaping levels full of infinite zombies.  Lord of the Rings is, at its core, a story about taking the ring to Mount Doom.  You might say Lord of the Rings is a story about fighting Sauron or good vs evil, but that's not the core conflict.  Once the ring has been delivered, the story is over.  If good defeats evil, the story is not over, because to fulfill the promise of the story they'd still have to walk over to the volcano and drop the ring in.

So to provide an example.  How to Train Your Dragon would be "a story about a boy and his dragon, set in a fantasy world inspired by vikings."  FTL would be "an indy spaceship management game heavily inspired by Star Trek and other sci fi."  Is that the heart of what FTL is?  Not really, but the heart of FTL (moving your little people around in your spaceship) has no obvious comparison so "spaceship management game" is the most understandable summary.  I left out the core conflict in those because its sort of implied, but FTL would be go on to say "battle and trade with different spaceships on your quest to defeat the rebels and save the federation."  One sentence is better than two so if you don't need that bit you can leave it out.

The keys here are brevity, accuracy, and creating interest, in about that order.  You don't want people to be bored by your summary, you don't want people to encounter your creative work and then be disappointed its not what you promised, and finally, you want people to be actually interested.  But something like a trailer or demo would be a better way to create interest; the elevator pitch is more a way to describe the game to friends and acquaintances.  If you had to write a blurb to create interest for you work, the elevator pitch is what you put at the front of the blurb so that people have a basic idea what you're describing, and then you'd sell the work with a bulleted list of features or a couple paragraphs of text.

Now, occasionally there are stories that defy the elevator pitch.  Examples: Homestuck, Gurren Lagann, Undertale.  These are stories that build their own rules from the ground up and are basically unique in terms of the mechanics of their world, their visuals, and their narrative.  Or unique enough its not easy to compare them.  Generally with these you'd want to get the elevator pitch out of the way.  A common tactic is to use an underwhelming pitch.  Undertale's creator described it as, IIRC, "a game about not killing people," which is technically correct but clearly leaving some stuff out.  Another way to get past the elevator pitch is to dodge entirely.  I've heard Gurren Lagann described as "exactly what teenage boys need."  The way I sell it to people is "its a mecha anime, its weird but its really good.  No one I've showed it to has ever disliked it."  Those aren't real pitches because they ignore what Gurren Lagann actually is.  But if you say "its a mecha anime that goes really, really far with a drill motif which is a metaphor for many things, mostly DNA and penises," people will probably not want to watch Gurren Lagann.

Anyway, once you get past the elevator pitch you go on to your feature list/trailer and that's how you sell the thing.  Stories like Homestuck that build their own rules are basically impossible to sell or explain via summary.  You need the demo or the first few chapters of the book or whatever to sell the idea.

Spoiler: unasked for advice (click to show/hide)

I would recommend however, that for any form of creative work, your FIRST attempt should not be something that's difficult to explain.  It should be a mundane premise executed well.  This is because in creative work its always best to break rules only when you know how to follow them.  For example if you were writing a book you don't NEED to follow a conventional structure and have the story reach its darkest point right before entering the final act.  But if you were going to subvert that it would be best to understand why that is the common structure, what your story will be missing without it and why the audience would expect it.

Remember, the world is full of "idea people".  The artist is the person who actually puts pen to paper.  Even if the result is complete ass, they still got further than the idea people.  Good art is art that is "finished, not perfect."  An idea so complicated it defies explanation, is going to have to progress quite far into its design process before it takes shape at all.  That can be discouraging, it can mask design problems until its too late to fix them.  For a beginner it can be better to use a familiar framework, thus you can see the results of your work more quickly and that builds confidence that the finished product will be worth the work you put into it.  Also if you've experienced hundreds of versions of the same type of art you know that if you copy it there won't be any fundamental flaws.

Crazy complicated ideas can be your first work.  Its been done before.  Its just a lot harder to do than making something simple.

[Reelya]

A good guide to elevator pitches is to read the synopses of movies in the TV guide and those movies review books (which probably don't exist anymore).