Over the years, I’ve often bragged/complained that I have too many ideas for stories. Admittedly, a lot of them suck, but surely there are some good ones I could write if I had a few centuries to actually get to all of them. But you’d basically just have to take my word for it. Well, sometime last December I was thinking about this and I thought, What if I just keep track of all the story ideas I have for, say a month, and put it up as a blog? So that’s what I did. Here are all the story ideas I had during January.
Now, when I say ideas, what
I mean are usually the “What if X?” beginnings of an idea that with a lot of
work could be turned into an actual story.
Most of these, the bulb went off and I spent a minute or two figuring
out what that could mean. I then jotted
it down, and most of them I didn’t think about again until I wrote up this
post. Some of these ideas could be fully
explored in short stories of a few hundred words, while others could easily be
novels.
I’ve roughly grouped them
to make things a little easier to follow.
Some of these grouped ideas happened within days of each other, while
some were separated by weeks. I suppose
I should have also made a note of what I was thinking about when these bulbs
went off, but I didn’t think to do that.
Maybe if I try this experiment again in a year or so. We’ll see.
Ideas I actually got
around to writing
I got the idea for “A Line in the Sand” after Trump spouted off nonsense about Greenland and
Panama. And I started wondering how a
true leader would react to his BS. “Not Worth It” similarly came about after some BS Musk posted.
Speaking of rich pricks,
I had an idea for story where all us peasants got together and purged the
millionaires. They were given the choice
of their money or their lives, and a surprising number chose death. Part of the story would be a monument to the
morons who thought life wasn’t worth living with only $999,999. While I didn’t write a full story for that
idea, I did write a microfiction story which I posted. Which is why I’m including it here. As well as the haiku I posted that came from
the idea for a story set in January 2029 that showed how things were so much
worse than in January 2025. I don’t know
if I’ll ever get around to writing the two full stories from these ideas, but
at least I got something out of them.
Unwritten story ideas
I had my first story idea
not even half an hour into January. I
was thinking about my story “Legacy,” which I had started writing in December
and just polished up to post in January.
The idea begins with us forcefully moving all the billionaires to
Mars. Then the idea split into would we
just sit back and watch them Lord of the Flies themselves, or would we
just nuke the site from orbit, just to be sure?
Speaking of billionaires
on Mars, another idea had a bunch of them going to Mars, but then the Earth –
where all their wealth was concentrated – is destroyed. So overnight they become penniless paupers
who have to start doing manual labor since there won’t be anyone on Earth to
support them.
And speaking of
billionaires obsessed with Mars, I had the basic idea of Musk actually being an
alien sent here to see if we are advanced enough to make contact with. It’s likely that we failed because we didn’t
realize he was an alien.
Since I brought up Musk,
I might as well segue into the political ideas I had. The first I’ll talk about is your basic political
scandal story as the First Lady has an affair with one of the President’s
advisors.
Another bare bones idea
was for a reporter pushing Trump or one of his advisors into admitting that all
the campaign promises were just lies to gain votes.
Another Trump inspired
story is one where the rest of the world moves on to clean energy, while in the
US we stay with fossil fuels. But then
one day, the rest of the world shut down all their wells and stop selling us
their dirty fuel. And we’re caught in
the lurch because planning ahead for a day without fossil fuels is apparently
woke, or whatever term they will use for the lack of basic common sense.
Lacking common sense led
to another story idea. Some people think
the country should be run like a company.
But what would it mean to be “let go” by your country? This led to this hypothetical exchange: “Your
grandparents didn’t meet their quota last month, we have to let them go.” “They’ve
worked here for decades!” “But they didn’t meet their quota. What do you not understand about that?”
The last political idea I
had came when I realized I should write a sequel to my story “Other Means.” That
was written during the campaign, and I thought it would be interesting to see
the characters thoughts now that Trump is back in office.
From politics, lets move on
to AIs. Probably the vaguest idea I had was
that the reasons AIs in movies and such always hate people, is because people
developed a hatred for AIs after years of corporations cramming AI into
everything. Like, we don’t need an AI in
our toaster. I’m not sure if that’s a
thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was trying to do that.
From hating AIs, I
wondered about the assassination of the first “real” AI, a sentient being like we
see in movies, not the crap now that gives people eight thumbs. The point of the story would be that people
actually feel sorry for it.
The last AI related story
is about a guy who finds a “rare” coin in his change. Like, he thinks he might be able to retire
just from this one coin. But it turns
out the app he has to check the value of coins is just this AI hack job that
gives out random numbers and means nothing to actual coin collectors.
Moving on, I had an idea
for this Fox News type show going on and on about this evil socialist who healed
people, without charging them a cent. They
would warn their viewers to be on the lookout for this Jesus Christ character. Because someone against corporations making a
profit off your health has to be anti-American.
Speaking of alternate
realities, I had an idea of a writer who creates such great dystopian
fiction. How do they do it? Well, they live in a better world with a
portal that they can open up to peek into our reality to get ideas. Which now that I write that up, sounds like
the most basic “edgy” story a high schooler would write.
Which brings us, not to
an original idea for a story, but to a redo of a story. I wrote a blog post about Rewriting the same story, about this book I read years ago of the collected short stories of an
author. Something of interest I found,
is that there were a couple of stories that were basically the same, and part
of me wondered if the author liked the idea and just rewrote the story every
few years. This led me to think I should
dig out one of my earliest stories and write a new version of it. Hopefully, I’ve grown as an author over the
years and I could turn out a higher quality product.
The last writing story
idea I had was for a writing couple to be flirting with, either their failed
story ideas or with the rejected stories.
Some of the oldest human art
are of hand stencils on cave walls. I
had the idea for a spacesuited astronaut making some glove print painting on
some lunar boulder.
And another moon story
came after I watched the video The Search for Apollo 10’s Lunar Module. The idea would be a mission to find Snoopy –
the name of Apollo 10’s Lunar Module – and take it to the moon as a museum
piece.
And now the group of ideas
for things that didn’t really fit into a group.
The first is the idea of an online store that hires parents to take
their cranky, screaming kids into physical stores. All so people might think to do their
shopping online instead of having to deal with screaming kids.
Someone finds a message
of some sort on a dollar bill. For
whatever reason, the message really speaks to them, and they wonder about the
person who left it. Then we find out the
person who left it had entirely different reasons for writing it on a bill.
Something happens that
makes everyone perfectly healthy and roughly twenty-five years old. From ninety-year-olds on their death beds to
newborns. What happens then? This was another weak idea in that there are a
million ways to take this, most of which would suck. For this to be an okay idea, there would need
to be some interesting hook to one of these million ways.
To end this section, here’s
the idea I probably put the most work into.
I recently got around to rewatching Dark, which I’ve been meaning
to do for the last … six months or so.
While it is one of my favorite shows, there are some issues with
it. And as I rewatched it this time, I
thought about what I could do differently if I were to make an American
version. Basically, there are some loose
ends I’d like to fix. But I eventually
realized that the story of Dark wouldn’t really fit in America. If you took the skin of the story and pasted
it onto America, there would be a lot of weird spots where things don’t fit
because the underlying bone structure of America is different from that of
Germany. If that makes sense. So instead of an American Dark, I
started thinking about a Dark-inspired story set in America.
This is the opening scene
I came up with. There is a sheriff of a
small town somewhere out west driving around one evening. At the edge of town he sees a man in an army
uniform stumbling along. The sheriff
stops and asks what’s wrong, and the guy – who has some injuries – is babbling
about a train. The sheriff sees the
name, I don’t know, Jones on the uniform, and asks if he is Corporal Erik
Jones, and the guy says yeah. So the
sheriff puts him in handcuffs and puts him in his car. But instead of going to the jail or even the
hospital, the sheriff takes him to a nice house with a gate. He buzzes in, and a guy asks angrily if he
knows what time it is. The sheriff
replies that “They have a visitor,” and the gate opens. The sheriff takes the man into a basement
room and ties him to a chair. The owner
comes in and starts questioning Jones.
At first about who he is and we find out that this twenty- or so-year
old guy in modern times was born in the 50’s.
Then the owner starts asking what was on the train, but Jones says he
doesn’t know. So they shoot him in the
leg, but he still claims he doesn’t know anything. He was just added security, that’s it. So they kill him.
Then we see a big board
labeled “The Missing” with photos of dozens of people. Some have been crossed out. The first name on the list is Corporal Erik
Jones who is shown to have disappeared on some date in the seventies, and they
cross out his name. Then maybe a flyover
of the town ending on a monument with a plaque for those – including Jones –
who died in a train derailment back in the seventies. (In case you’re wondering, he was assumed
dead, but they never found a body.)
The idea is there was
something – maybe from a crashed alien ship? – the military was transporting by
train when it derailed. As a result,
there are now … time doors, that appear at random times and locations around
this town. By knowing when and where
they are, you can travel through time.
And there is a secret society working towards some goal. Probably, there are two or three groups,
sometimes working together, and sometimes working against each other.
What the series would actually
be about and who all the characters would be, I didn’t get that far. Maybe if a network gave me money for a treatment,
I’d hammer something out.
Dream ideas
Speaking of dreams, I don’t
know if me being a writer is part of the reason, but I have weird dreams. And every now and then I’ll half-wake up from
a dream and think it would make for a fantastic story. Although what almost always happens is I think
about it for a minute when I’m fully awake and realize it’s just
gibberish. Like the kind an AI could
come up with. (A couple months ago I had
the idea that our dreams are just AI hallucinations.) Anyway, here are the two dream ideas I had I
thought would work.
The first had a group of
people playing poker to see who had to deal with some annoying character. Apparently, the loser had to take this
apprentice jester. What that meant, I
don’t know.
The other dream came in
two parts. In the first part there was a
pile or rocks about a mile from my house, so I walked to them. But I wanted to take them back home, and it
wasn’t until I got to the pile that I realized it would be easier if I
drove. Especially since they were more
boulders. But since I was there I
started smashing them, while also hiding from any cars that went by. And then I was back home where a wizard –
possibly even Snape – was going around the house trying to find these portals
that let you collect gems. It was like
being inside a video game. I had already
collected these gems, but the puzzles had reset, but I couldn’t remember how to
do them.
Now when I half woke up
from this, I thought it would make for an interesting idea that I knew I had to
remember for this list. But when I fully
woke up, I couldn’t figure out what the story was supposed to be. Maybe an AI does write my dreams.
Lost idea
I did pretty well keeping
track of ideas, but there is one I lost.
Basically, just as I got home from work one night, I was getting out of
my car when I had an idea for some story.
I stopped and thought it was pretty good, and I would need to remember
it. Well, I went inside, took care of
some things and heated up some leftovers.
It was twenty or so minutes later I sat down in front of my computer and
I remembered I had an idea, but I could not remember what it was.
***
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