I’m gathering some early reader impressions on a story idea I’m developing.
I put together a short anonymous poll — one vote, no signup, no data collected.
If you’re willing to take a quick look and give your honest reaction, I’d appreciate it.
Link to the poll: Be Part of the Verdict
Thanks for taking a moment to help a fellow writer.
If your decision to move forward with this idea depends on the vote of complete strangers on the Internet… then there’s no need to wait for the results. It’s not the story you want to tell. It’s not the story that needs to be told. The one that follows you around, keeps gnawing at you, begs you to write it down and makes you push any doubters out of its way.
Fair point — I’m not waiting for permission to write it.
The poll’s just a small experiment to see how instinctive reactions cluster, not a vote on whether the story gets written.
The story is well underway; I’m just curious how readers respond to the premise itself.
As @November_Sierra points out, you are not likely to get a good story from a crowdsourced plot.
This is highly reminiscent of an Ayn Rand work called “The Night of January 16th”. In that play, members of the live theater audience are selected as jurors to sit on the stage, and their judgement of guilt or innocence effects the ending of the play.
Leaving the fate of the story up to random people on the internet…. Yikes. Clearly you did not consider what the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council learned to their despair in 2016[1]
All that said, what you really are asking for isn’t READER input, but peer input. This is best handled in a small informal writing group.
Boaty McBoatface was the winner of that poll, and it was the gag that sailed a thousand memes… ↩︎
Perhaps I should refine my goals here, rather than get answers to a question I didn’t actually ask.
We may be talking about two different things.
I’m not asking readers to influence the plot; I’m simply checking how the premise feels at first glance — the same way a movie trailer gauges early buzz.
The story itself isn’t up for a vote. This was just an early‑morning curiosity designed for a simple “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” reaction.
I understand your intention better now; but as you put it in your survey, it sounds very much like “asking for permission”:
Here’s your mission: read the story pitch below and decide whether it deserves a book and/or movie greenlight.
or
Every vote shapes the fate of a story.
Thank you for that clarification.
At the risk of seeming pedantic, you don’t ‘elevator pitch’ readers. It sounds a lot like what you are doing, given your revisions in scope.
It’s a failing of mine that I want to start getting feedback and accolades (deserved or not) before I finish something. It’s the worst parts of the ADHD focus-cycle at play for me.
I’ll stand by what I said earlier, this is best dealt with inside of a informal writer’s group. Such a group would likely be best equipped to help you decide if the project deserves any further effort on your part.
Why on earth would you let anyone know what you were up to until it is finished? To me, keeping it secret gives me more energy to write, keeps away any negativity that might undermine the project. I have always done that. The one time I shared an unfinished manuscript with some people I deeply regreted it. It sapped my enthusiam to go forword and it is still languishing waiting for other projects to be completed. It will eventually get published, but the negativity (temporarily) took out the momentum I had built up. Now the only people who see my unpublished work are proof readers and editors.
For myself… Reinforcement bias. As someone that struggles to stay on task, I see how much needs to still be done far easier than how much I’ve gotten done. So I long to be patted on the head and told I’m not wasting time I could be using doing something that is more instantly satisfying, like playing old video games again for the Nth time.
Sadly, what you say is often true as well. As soon as I let an ARC out for my close cadre of alpha/beta readers I always worry (and more than once start editing right away to fix what I know they will find).
Neurotic artist is neurotic it seems.
I completely understand that impulse, @FanLi — protecting the spark until it’s ready. But in some cases, a small, well‑timed reveal can energize a project rather than drain it.
Unless you disclose the entire plot or broad story architecture, no two people will ever produce identical stories from a single concept line. The DNA of an idea is universal; the execution is personal.
Think of how it works in other fields: a filmmaker teases a concept, a startup floats a prototype, a crowdfunder shares a sketch. Those glimpses don’t give away the whole story — they invite curiosity and build momentum.
A good logline does the same. Something like:
“In a future where memories are currency, one man must decide whether to sell his past to buy his freedom.”
That’s enough to spark imagination without handing over the blueprint. And it sometimes invites responses that are invaluable to your project. Much success to your work.
Everyone has their own methods. If I were to reveal what I am doing it is only to a very select “master-mind” group, and even then it is mostly after I have done most of it and they get to proof read/edit it. This works for me.
Otherwise, if someone asks me what I am working on I give a vague response especially at the beginning. If it is almost finished I am might be more forthcoming especially if they are potential reviewers—they might get an abstract.
However, it should be noted that I am not a fiction writer so I work in a different environment than fiction writers.
Some people will love it. Some people will hate it. Finding the people who love it is a marketing problem, though, not a writing problem.
Fortunately for writers, a book can be a world-beating success with sales numbers that the movie industry would see as a career-ending flop. At the same time, a book’s premise gives much less information about the final product than a movie’s trailer.
@FanLi, thanks for the clarification.