A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 14

This is the 9th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Last week, 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: Go random.

This is going to sound really stupid. Well, it is really stupid. But all it takes is one time to pay off, then it becomes clever because as we know, there’s a fine line between clever and stupid.

Anyway the very first screenwriting class I taught 16 years ago was at UCLA. One night, I took two caps and some 3x5 inch index cards. I handed out 10 cards to each student, then instructed them on 5 cards to write a job [e.g., plumber, lawyer, dog catcher] and on the other 5 cards to write a location [e.g., shopping mall, swimming pool, church]. I collected the cards, jobs in one hat, locations in the other.

Then we went around the room, each student pulling a card from each hat, an exercise in generating totally random story conceits.

So someone pulls out “Doctor” and “Cruise Ship.” Nothing much there.

Then another person pulls out “Jockey” and “Restaurant.” Again nothing.

Then someone pulls outs “Cop” and “Kindergarten.”

I. Kid. You. Not. “Kindergarten Cop,” totally random, right there in that Westwood classroom. Okay, so the moment of inspiration was 12 years after the movie, but still it proved — sorta — that sometimes totally random, stupid ideas have the potential to generate story concepts… and even be a little clever.

Today’s story: Teen Girl Posed For 8 Years As Married Man To Write About Baseball And Harass Women.

For the last eight years, baseball fan-turned-writer Becca Schultz has presented herself online as Ryan Schultz, a false identity she assumed when she was 13 years old, duping and harassing women on Twitter along the way.

On Wednesday night, a woman named Erin tweeted a series of screenshots announcing that Schultz is not actually Ryan, a married father of two studying to become a pharmacist. Instead, Schultz is a 21-year-old college student in the Midwest, whose entire career as an aspiring baseball writer has been under a fraudulent byline.

Schultz began contributing to Baseball Prospectus’s local White Sox blog at the end of the 2016 season and wrote for BP South Side and BP Wrigleyville throughout the 2017 season. Additionally, Schultz wrote for the SB Nation sabermetrics site Beyond the Box Score throughout 2017.

People who knew Ryan Schultz online say that in retrospect, some of his behavior seemed odd, but no one expected that this moody White Sox fan from Missouri would actually be a teenage girl.

Schultz’s fraud was as true to the catfish genre as can be. She told the people who discovered she was not who she said she was that she assumed the identity because she felt as if she couldn’t write about baseball professionally as a woman, especially at the age of 13. As the deception went on, she couldn’t figure out how to get out of the middle of her web of lies.

Over time, Ryan formed serial relationships with women who use Twitter to talk about baseball and hockey. Some women told me that he would get drunk and berate them; others told me they felt emotionally abused and manipulated because he would imply that he’d hurt himself if they didn’t continue to talk to him. Ryan received nudes from at least two women I spoke with, one of whom said she did it because she was afraid he would hurt himself if she didn’t.

Schultz’s story is interesting for reasons far beyond its sheer shock value. It’s entirely reasonable that at the time she created the Ryan persona, she might not have thought she could easily have a career writing about baseball as a woman. She’s also drawn a big red arrow sign pointing toward the exploitative ecosystem of online sportswriting, which created the conditions for her to get her enviable opportunities without much interrogation from editors who have a lot to do and few resources with which to do it.

Most of all, though, there are real women who have been genuinely hurt by their interactions with a woman who, as she tells the story, caught herself up in a lie she didn’t know how to untell, not least because it was bringing her what she wanted.

The first part of the headline was the thing that grabbed my eyes: Female teen poses as man to write about baseball. That immediately conjured up ideas for a sports comedy… a romantic comedy… even a farcical comedy.

Then I read the last part of the headline: Harrass women.

Whoa. That suggests a much different story. If you read the article, it includes two classic dynamics which exist in stories whereby a character assumes the identity of someone else:

• They don’t know how to extricate themselves from their ruse.
• They begin to assume the personality of their alter ego.

So maybe this is a story akin to Icarus who flew too close to the sun, only to plunge to his death.

Kyle “The Big K” King is a sports writer covering the NBA for Bleacher Bums, a popular sports blog. Koenig writes a twice weekly column about basketball and he is the star of the blog, largely responsible for the outfits 400% increase in site traffic over the last year. In fact for the first time in its 7 year history, Bleacher Bums has turned a tidy profit. For his efforts, Koenig manages to eke out a modest income which he augments through stock market trading, more than enough to support his wife and son.

Except Kyle isn’t a middle aged hoops fan living in Danville, Virginia. Rather, ‘he’ is Kylie King, an adolescent junior at Jim Hill High School in Harriet, Minnesota, sixty miles northwest of Minneapolis, but as far as Kylie is concerned, it’s the far edge of the galaxy.

Her obsession with the Minnesota Timberwolves is what led her to stumble into sports writing. Figuring no one would listen to a then thirteen year-old girl, she assumed Kyle’s identity.

Now she’s in a jam: Due to he notoriety, she’s being offered the opportunity to become a syndicated columnist — as Kyle, of course.

Meanwhile, the line between Kyle and Kylie gets blurrier and blurrier, and her abysmal social life in Minnesota drives her to seek out romance online as Kyle.

If I were to develop this setup, I’d put more and more pressure on Kylie. Falling in love with a girl online. Pushed to meet with the syndicate press people. Parent hassles. And always the threat of being exposed.

May be something there, don’t you think?

There you go: My fourteenth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Here are links for all the previous posts in this year’s series:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13

Each day this month, I invite you to click on RESPONSES and join me to do some further brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when you play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.