Forum: Story Ideas

I usually have three or four new story ideas before I've even got half way through the story I'm working on.

So I figured I could start a thread here in this forum and just keep appending my story ideas. Maybe one day I'll write them, but I have absolutely no worries about any of you taking ideas, unchanged or improved, too :)

So here goes:

DO-OVER

I've been toying with a twist on do-over. First off, its not the protagonist whom is doing-over. Second off, this is not so strong on the rags-to-riches; more a mind-bending terminator-ish chase where two young lovers find themselves on the run and becoming stronger by trusting each other.

My idea is that a boy intervenes in some bullying and would have been badly beaten if an older woman hadn't intervened and protected him and also a vulnerable girl. This girl is the typical outcast at school whom he - and everyone else - had previously ignored or bullied.

This woman pops up a few other times too. Its like she's a guardian angel for the girl, and increasingly for the boy too. It's confusing. It seems the woman is pushing them together. They like each other blah blah.

But who is their mysterious guardian woman? And she's a bit scary - would you trust her? - and she seems to be living outside the law. And the girl looks a lot like her...

The threat gets more serious.

Eventually the woman encourages them to elope.

The woman slowly unravels as it becomes difficult to tell if they really are being pursued or if it's all in the woman's head...

She eventually says she is the girl from the future, an awful alternative where the boy died when he confronted her bullies and where the girl went on to have an awful life that spiralled into abusive boyfriends and drug dealers and typical scum life. And somehow she's come back to save the girl and get her the boy she always fancied and a happy ever after.

The woman, coming back, has no id so has been living on robbing and killing all the drug dealers that the girl fell in with her first awful time through. Etc.

Young couple are scared and try to run away from everyone, from the woman too, but find themselves pursued by drug dealers wanting their money back etc.

Of course the guardian woman intervenes and dies saving them one last time. And they discover she has the same scars and marks that the girl has... maybe the woman wasn't mad or bad but really the girl travelling back?

My previous attempt at writing a short drama wasn't so popular so actually following through on this one is kinda daunting for me.

South Sea Island

This is an excellent article on some islands in the South Pacific which are really called _The Disappointment Islands_.

This article, along with Robert Louis Stevenson's Island Stories gives me lots of ideas about a backpacker heading there and finding himself falling in love with the place and a suitable girl.

My plot is basically the lowly intern, just finished college and with a mountain of debt, finding the workplace super frustrating. In the openning of the story the protagonist gets so frustrated with management burying his first business report that he throws some scissors at the wall in frustration. Security are called and he has to box up and leave immediately. A sympathetic secretary slips the world map that he skewered with the scissors into the box on the way out.

Getting home he looks at the map and notices a tiny edge of green right where the scissors stabbed it. All the sea on a world map, and he'd hit an island.

Of course its the 119th island in French Polynesia. And so our intrepid out-of-work new-grad decides on a gap year and goes, almost penniless, to the end of the earth on a whim.

Of course as he takes the last ferry to reach the island he meets a beautiful young student travelling from the school on the big island to visit her folks.

Cue discovering a paradise, cue building a Crusoe-style dwelling, cue bliss.

And then he finds footsteps in the sand. Girl Friday. The student girl who has decided to come check up on him.

Cue romance.

And then, for drama, a typhoon approaching etc.

And they just about survive, and admit in the darkest hours when they fear for their lives that they are in love.

Dead romantic.

CANTERBURY TALES

Everybody has kind of heard of them, some have been forced to study them at school, nobody remembers them.

Actually, they are really rude!

Imagine a group of first year university students sharing a coed. They find themselves sitting around a kitchen table on the first night and one of them shares a bottle of vodka or something. People get steadily drunk and inhibitions drop and then one of them starts telling a wild tale they claim is true. This is the first tale.

Steadily, night by night, they take turns to entertain the others. Each takes a turn to tell their tale.

Of course the group are getting risqué too. It slowly becomes apparent that the new tales are actually accounts of midnight liaisons in the corridor and that these wild things are really happening.

Will our intrepid MC have a tale to tell when it's his turn? Which of the girls will visit him the night before to give him that tale he can tell?

MEMORY LOSS

(I thought and forwarded this to Aroslav for his Calling All Time Travellers blog-post. I think a variant of it could make a great stand-alone story without any time-travel element)

Protagonist walks into redneck bar and the music stops kinda thing. Pool balls pause mid-roll. Everyone turns. MC goes to bar, finding themselves limping slightly. Looks down and there's a strange heavy tag on their leg; turns out to be a monitoring anklet thing. Everyone toasting MC and joking about it. Sheriff turns up and tells MC off and takes him away to cool off. So MC finds themselves a petty criminal in backcountry and the gang they integrate with is shallow and mostly into drinking too much. MC finds love and slowly the girls notice he is not acting like he used to and they all start sharing their dreams of escaping to the big city. MC buys bus to take them all away. Turns into road-trip, turns into them saying thank-you, turns into them not wanting to get off bus in Hollywood. They vote to drive to East coast instead. Harem on bus.

European tour

Lad bumps into group of three American girls doing their grand tour of Europe thing before going to college. Two of the girls are bitchy and unimpressed but the plain Jane third keeps them from completely ignoring him and eventually talks the boy into joining them. Four explore some of Europe.

Of course it could turn into a classic harem.

But my kind of twist would be slowly boy loosing infatuation with the pretty two girls and falling deeply for the plain Jane. And then it turns out that the plane Jane is the rich one. Perhaps the other two, also rich families but not as rich, accuse the boy of being a gold digger and almost succeed in driving a wedge, but true love wins out and two girls slowly come around to what a nice guy he is and it becomes clear they really weren't so horrible after all, they were just looking out for their friend.

Pre-apocalypse premath or whatever

My take on the post-apocalyptic story:

New college students introduce themselves to each other in the dorm and make friends etc. One of them tells how his uncle has a stash of stuff at his hunting cabin in case the russians come etc.

This gets them talking about the apocalypse and zombies and everything and the group begins to fixate on it and talks themselves into going to the cabin for some survival training.

The group are woefully unready to rough it etc. Perhaps the prettiest girl is surprisingly clever even though she has high heels etc. Anyway, the group are all alone in the woods...

And then they start believing there really is an apocalypse! Something to make them believe they are suddenly truly alone.

Worryingly, lord of the flies, the boy whose uncle owns the cabin takes over and starts to lead the other boys and turn this into a nightmare. The ringleader fixates on how the girls had joked that they wouldn't fuck him if he was the last man on earth, and it seems he might be prepared to do in all the other boys to make himself the girls only choice...?

Our hero manages to rescue the girls from the other boys, and romance blossoms whilst they are under the pressure of trying to escape back to the civilisation and the world they begin to believe is actually still there.

And the story ends hinting that the apocalypse was all in the head of the boy whose uncle owns the cabin, but the the possibility that it happened is left tantalizingly open...

The maid

Perhaps peaking in Victorian times, but in fact right up until WW2, young middle-class and lower-upper-class boys would be sent off to board at small private schools that were basically the house of the school teacher.

In the story, a young boy, perhaps the middle or youngest son of a normal "lord of the manor", i.e. no real prospects of inheriting wealth unless the older son tragically dies, is sent off to such a boarding school.

There, he meets the young scullery maid.

Now, rather than the obvious crud, instead its a delicate tale of how these two teenagers grow to be real friends. The boy teaches the maid to read and write, and whilst the other boarders imagine the boy is using the maid as wouldn't be uncommon, in fact its a true friendship.

When the boy heads off to university he takes the maid with him to be his maid.

Now the boy is in a big town, taking his own lodgings rather than staying in halls, and treating his maid rather too well for her station.

Tragically, his brother dies in battle, a hero. The boy has survivor guilt of a type, but is now small-time wealthy. Has a small income, anyhow. And the young ladies and their scheming mothers start circling.

However, the not so subtle advances of the young socialites trying to 'bag him' make him and the maid realize that they are truly in deep proper soulmate forever love.

They move back to the manor he will inherit, with the maid his legal wife but her unsuitable history hidden from his parents and the society there.

Then a persistent young lady from the university town drops by, one more chance to bag him, and discovers them married and recognizes the maid.

Of course the couple survive this expose and live happily ever after.

Homesteading

A sixteen year old boy taking an aimless drive on a rainy day gives a soaked pedestrian a lift. Turns out the jaywalker is a girl from school and she is off to visit an old couple on an old small farm in the hills behind town. The girl is black and deeply suspicious of the white boy, but the boy isn't racist like everyone else seems to be and, slowly, by also helping this old black couple living in the forest, he demonstrates that.

By xmas he is slowly catching up with all the forestry that the old man can no longer do. He brings down a small fir tree as an xmas tree the girl gets the idea that they can sell them. So that is their first idea to help sell farm produce.

Slowly the young teens are helping get the farm working again. Sitting up on the high meadow they talk and discover that they both want to work the farm when they graduate rather than the modern college debt etc that lays ahead these days. They go into partnership.

The girl arranges for them to rent the farm from the old couple, and they set about raising turkeys in time for thanksgiving when they are seventeen.

All this time their friendship and partnership has been hidden from everyone in the town, at school and at home.

But then the boy feels more and more distant from his girlfriend and they split up.

By the time prom comes around, they decide to go together. And they are shocked by the animosity their mixed race causes. Now they are in the dog house.

They decide to move up to the farm they are renting and camp out up there, as the farm is an escape from the town and everything.

Their efforts at farmer markets makes them sustainable but they have no real money. They decide to build a super cheap cabin in the best spot up on the high meadow etc.

Cue lots of discussion about how to farm and how to build a modern day small cabin cheaply. This aspect is actually really interesting (to me).

Then of course the town-folks have their revenge and the couple have to survive the modern day well-hidden racism e.g. being reported for building without a permit, not following code, etc.

The old couple die, and the contract for their lease was worded to give them first-refusal on buying the property, but they struggle to raise the asking price and contemplate debt. Somehow, they manage. And now they pretend to live down in the couple's old squalid but legal hovel, whereas really they are carving the dream homesteading off-grid life higher up the hill etc.

The bleakest future

How do you imagine the future if there isn't some asteroid, nuclear war nor terrorist meltdown?

Set in 2060, the US is split into the "haves" and the "nots". The haves have tech to insulate them from the grim declining world and habitually wear augmented-reality shades that make the trees look healthy and the girls pretty etc.

Everything is okay when they can't see the creeping squalor and who cares to stop burning shale gas when only nots risk losing their homes to the climate change? The world is reverting to feudalism where the nots work for the haves and do menial jobs because why invest in robots when you have cheap labor etc?

In all this a have boy is shown the truth by a not girl. The boy is from the poorer end of the have spectrum and his subscription to SimWorld13 lapses and his visor momentarily shows him the the paint is peeling in the classroom and that his mum has a weight loss subscription that makes here waist appear small to those with visors etc.

His mum is called "Greta", btw; a very popular girls name in the 2030s with the haves, during the time and it was trendy to pay lip service to saving the world they were destroying.

Obviously the boy and girl fall in love etc. There is general shock that a have is dating a not and everyone assumes the girl is trying to trap the boy and there is a lot of anger that the boy won't make the girl sign a pre-date pre-nup, this being a time where there are "date chasing" lawyers who offer to sue on behalf of not girls who don't get a second date etc.

I just haven't worked out how the boy and girl save the planet in the end. One obvious one is that his mum is a scientist with a world correcting machine to clean the atmosphere, and the kids fight through security to turn it on. Another might be that they hack the visor servers to disable them and make the haves confront what they have let the world become. Better ideas?

High school bullying

The senior brother is troubled by the verbal bullying his little junior sister is getting from the queen junior bitch. He's not the 'in' crowd himself, and a bit of a loner, and there's not really much he can do though.

He also has the weight of finals on his mind. Desperately calculating that he needs to max his final year grades just to scrape the scholarships he needs to get to university, he sets about trying to find the best possible study partner.

And then, in a school that takes grade privacy as seriously as it does the PDA rules, he inadvertently works out that that the senior year queen, who is more distant than bitchy, is actually, surprisingly, the likely valedictorian!

Cue some attempts to even get to speak to her, and somehow convince her to help him study etc. Not sure how this happens.

And there's the head jock, who tries all the time to get this senior year queen to be his girlfriend etc.

In the end, the senior queen is helping the boy improve his grades just in time, and love quietly blossoms but they both try to suppress it as they are both secretly desperate to do well gradewise.

The head jock, who turns out to not be completely stupid, works it out and they end up admitting to him, and talking him into not torpedoing everything.

By the prom, they decide to go together, and even convince the head jock to take the younger sister.

And so the school graduates, the girl is valedictorian and the boy salutatorian and the tiara for senior year queen is passed not to the nemesis junior year queen bitch but instead to the sister...

So the boy got the hottest and secretly-not-air-headed girl, the sister gets a mutually-infatuated sports scholar and the junior year queen bitch gets her comeuppance. Happy ever after.

Divers idea - sex deep underwater.

Would the extra pressure make sex more fun or less?

AJ

Do Over - imagines?

A normal do-over starts with some traumatic event, often lightning, a time machine or deathbed discussion with god. This can be really good, or it can be perfunctory, because the meat of the story is what happens after.

Imagine instead how you could have a do over story without such an event. For example:

Protagonist is old and weary, perhaps even on death bed. They start reminiscing, describing big regrets in life, like the first wife or the obviously-up-for-it-in-hindsight girl they didn't leave a party with etc. And then they get around to describing the girl they grew up with that they later learned had a crush on them, and they had never even thought of her that way until it was too late and both had made bad marriage choices etc. The reminiscing focuses in on one of the pivotal moments when the girl was hinting at her infatuation to the clueless boy etc.

Only suddenly the story changes. The boy is doing it over and making the mature choices this time around! History is changing.

All through the story the characters passing though get a commentary about how they ended up etc. But slowly history is changing, and now the boy and girl are together and love is blossoming and the boy doesn't regret not following that other girl home from the party and tying into other memories and bad choices mentioned earlier.

By the end of the story it's really blurred if this is all in the MC's head or if they have rewritten history etc. And then at the very end the girl checks up, asks if MC is feeling better etc, and it's ambiguous if the actual life followed the first or the second narrative.

So