A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 1

This is the 13th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work through during this series of posts. For today, the most basic one:

If you have aspirations of becoming a professional screenwriter, you should be in the habit of generating story concepts.

Let’s say you write and sell a spec script. Congratulations. You’re the “flavor-of-the-week.” Your agent and manager set up meetings across Hollywood with producers and studio execs. The first words out of their mouths will likely be some variation of “Love your script ” (even if they haven’t really read it). The second thing they say will almost assuredly be, “What else have ya’ got?” If you haven’t been developing other stories, that is likely to be a very short meeting.

By the way, I give away these story ideas. They’re yours to use however you like. In fact, several writers have gone off and written spec scripts from story concepts presented in this annual series, one script making the Nicholl semifinals.

There are many ways to generate story ideas. This month, I focus on one: Looking for ideas in news sources. Each of the items I’ll be posting for the next 30 days comes from a news site.

Today’s story idea: 24,000-Year-Old Organism Found Alive in Permafrost.

A microscopic animal has been revived after slumbering in the Arctic permafrost for 24,000 years.

Bdelloid rotifers typically live in watery environments and have an incredible ability to survive. Russian scientists found the creatures in a core of frozen soil extracted from the Siberian permafrost using a drilling rig.

“Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism,” said Stas Malavin, a researcher at the Soil Cryology Laboratory at the Pushchino Scientific Center for Biological Research in Russia.

Since for decades Hollywood has operated with the “similar but different” business model, when I flagged this article, my mind went to this…

Plot: A cop and an FBI agent race for answers after law abiding people suddenly become violent criminals.

This…

Plot: Scientists and American Air Force officials fend off a bloodthirsty alien organism while at a remote arctic outpost.

And of course, this…

Plot: The crew of a commercial spacecraft encounter a deadly lifeform after investigating an unknown transmission.

The Thing From Another World and Alien play it straight, but The Hidden (as I recall having seen the movie once upon its original release in 1987) has humans acting in such over the top fashion, it goes for some laughs.

What if we took the conceit — alien microbe uses human bodies for to conduct parasitic mayhem — and went for a horror-comedy. In the vein of this:

While I like the idea of global warming being the device which enables the formerly frozen microbe to emerge and begin propagating by infesting human bodies, we could also explore shifting the locale to the Amazon jungle. And that brings to mind this:

Pick your group of diverse of characters, probably on some sort of scientific research junket. Ecology? Biology? Rumors of the last tribe of people who have yet to intersect with modern civilization, so perhaps anthropology? They intersect with the alien microbe, Infestation #1, a marked shift in that individual’s behavior to the tune of much violence and mayhem…

There you go. Survival of the fittest as the microbe shifts from one human host body to another. Kill the body, the microbe simply finds another to enact chaos.

And for good measure, why not throw in some exploding bodies?

That’s my setup. My first story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Each day in April, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are valuable skills for a writer to develop.

Here are links to previous series:

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2010)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2011)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2012)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2013)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2014)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2015)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2016)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2017)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2018)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2019)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2020)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2021)

See you in RESPONSES to hear YOUR take on this story idea. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.