A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 11

This is the 11th 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 my through during this series of posts.

Initially, I provided a daily explanation about why you should make it a habit to be generating story ideas. This week, I’ll give you some tips on how to come up with stories.

Tip: Halliwell’s Film Guide.

This is based on the anecdote I heard about Woody Guthrie. Having written 4,000 songs in his life, he was asked how he came up with so many melodies. His answer: “Well, I take a melody I like, and I change it a lil’ here, and change it a lil’ there, and I make it my own.”

Same thing with Halliwell’s. You can read a post I wrote about it all the way back in November 2008, how you can read through the 24,000 movie listings — each with a logline — then gender and genre-bend your life to creative bliss.

Today’s story: The Woman Shaking Up the Diamond Industry.

Diamonds may not be as scarce as the industry would have people believe, but very large rough diamonds are vanishingly rare — except at one mine. Lucara has operated at Karowe for seven years, and during that time the firm has discovered an astonishing number of big stones, including three of the ten largest rough diamonds in history, and fifteen stones weighing more than three hundred carats. Since the discovery of the Cullinan, in 1905, Karowe is the only place where stones heavier than a thousand carats have been found. In 2015, Lucara recovered a near-pristine white diamond of eleven hundred and nine carats, which became known as the Lesedi La Rona — “Our Light,” in Setswana. The big black-covered diamond found by Otsogile Metseyabeng last April is now known as the Sewelô, which means “A Rare Find.” The price of a diamond increases exponentially as its weight rises, because of the scarcity of big stones. Lucara’s streak has made the company profitable at a time when many producers have struggled. It has also reshaped the diamond industry.

Lucara was founded in 2009 by two Canadian mining executives, Eira Thomas and her friend Catherine McLeod-Seltzer, together with the Swedish-Canadian mining billionaire Lukas Lundin, who serves as the firm’s chairman. At the time, both women were already thriving in a male-dominated sector. McLeod-Seltzer was one of the first female C.E.O.s in the mining industry. She had created and led several successful gold- and copper-mining ventures, particularly in South America, and was known for her expertise in raising funds. The Northern Miner, a trade magazine, named her a 1999 “Mining Man of the Year,” apparently without irony. Lucara is made in the image of its founders: most of its leadership team, and more than half its executives, in Botswana and outside the country, are women.

Eira Thomas, who is now Lucara’s C.E.O., has been prospecting since she was a child. Now fifty-one years old, with reddish hair, catlike features, and blue eyes, she has the sort of calm demeanor that one associates with oceangoing naval captains. When we met at a hotel in the Mayfair district of London, in August, she wore ornate diamond rings and earrings made from stones discovered at her mines, but I sensed that she would have been just as happy decked head to toe in waterproof gear, hiking through the tundra.

Her father, Grenville Thomas, was born in Swansea, Wales, the son of a steelworker. He became a laborer in a Welsh coal mine when he was sixteen years old. He retrained as an engineer, and then, at twenty-three, immigrated to Canada, where he worked in nickel and gold mines. In 1965, Gren, as everyone called him, was asked to join a team prospecting in the Arctic. He didn’t know much about geology, but he instantly loved the prospector’s life: canoes, caribous, wolves.

In the seventies, Gren prospected for copper and rare-earth metals near Yellowknife, in Canada’s wild Northwest Territories. When Eira, his first child, turned six, she began joining him during her summer vacations. Gren and his team had to be constantly on the lookout to insure that little Eira was not eaten by a bear. Like her father, Eira was bright, curious, and outdoorsy. In college, she abandoned a plan to pursue medicine and got a geology degree instead. In 1991, when she was twenty-two, Gren asked her to cut short her post-graduation travels, in Africa, to help him look for diamonds in Canada.

Eira told her father, “Dad, there’s no diamonds in Canada — everyone knows that.”

This is a TV series. Think Dallas or Dynasty, a nighttime soap opera about the diamond industry — money, intrigue, politics, power, rivalries, corporate espionage. It’s told from the perspective of a female Protagonist, CEO of an upstart company which is taking on the Big Boys with newfangled ideas about mining. They prove to be especially good at finding large uncut gems.

All this does not sit well with larger established diamond companies.

I mean, we are talking about diamonds like this:

Quite literally worth tens of millions of dollars.

There you go, my 11th story idea of the month. And it’s yours. Free! What would YOU do with it?

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10

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.

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.