Every story stems from a crisis. As readers, we are most interested in the struggles of our fellow humans. Our interest is most easily captured by bad news, stress, conflict. Not that the outcomes must be bad – on the contrary, we love stories that depict triumph in the face of adversity. But the thing that most easily grabs us is when tension, crisis, and turmoil erupt into everyday life.
This is my list of ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Am I worried about someone stealing my ideas? No. Ideas are not finished pieces. A hundred people could write starting with the same idea and no two finished products would be alike. Feel free to use an idea from here. If you see an idea you like, run with it. If you get a finished piece from it, let me know. I’d love to read it!
This is the list I had so far prior to setting up this site. Not much, but it’s a start:
- A boy and his attacker, would be kidnapper, assailant, whatever, are in a severe accident. The soul of the attacker chases the soul of the boy across a hellish landscape, possibly purgatory, or some as-yet-undefined version of the after world. The attacker has died, but has not realized it. The boy is in having a near-death experience, and must find his way back to his body before being consumed by his pursuer.
- A man is abducted by a serial killer who is collecting ‘characters’ for his next novel.
- A man awakens in his small, rural town in southern Ohio only to find everyone in the town has been brutally murdered.
- A man awakens one morning to find himself in the body of another person - a serial killer.
- A man is abducted by a secret society consisting of the decedents of aliens abandoned on earth at the dawning of mankind.
- A woman psychologist is given charge of helping a John Doe recover his memory after a bizarre accident brings him to her hospital naked, alone, and without identification. The only memory he has is that he dreams the same dream every night - a dream of a stone he refers to as the ’navel of the earth’.
- A young boy and his parents are trapped in a life of rigorous routine. Each night, they go to sleep to the rhythm of war drums, each day they wake, and work their farm, fearful. The father is strict, often referring to the loss of a previous child.