A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 16

This is the 11th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Because the best way to come up with a great story idea is to come up with a lot of ideas. And the best way to come up with a lot of ideas is to be proactive in sourcing story ideas.

Today’s story: Woman quits job, searches 57 days for missing dog in Montana.

After 57 days, a Washington woman’s exhaustive search for her missing border collie ended in tears of happiness when the pair were reunited in a Kalispell subdivision.

Carole King, of Deer Park, had traveled to Flathead County for a four-day getaway with her husband when the unthinkable happened. They arrived the night of July 20 and left their 7-year-old border collie, Katie, in their hotel room while they went out for dinner. When the couple returned to My Place Hotel in Kalispell, Katie was nowhere to be found.

“It was devastating. I got sick to my stomach,” King told the Daily Inter Lake.

She frantically searched the room for any signs of her beloved companion before racing to the front desk clerk in hopes that Katie was still in the building.

“I said to the clerk, ‘please tell me you have my dog.’ The clerk says ‘no, she left about 4, 4 1/2 hours ago,’ ” King said. When the automatic doors opened, Katie had gone right out.

King and her husband searched the hotel grounds, calling for Katie until the wee hours of the morning to no avail. King suspected that the thunder from an evening storm caused Katie to panic, open their hotel room door and flee. The clerk helped get the word out on social media with a post in a local missing pets Facebook group and assisted King in creating a flyer.

As the days turned into weeks, word about Katie spread like wildfire online, spurring the creation of multiple Facebook groups of users who offered words of encouragement and shared information about recent sightings in hopes of bringing Katie home. King posted at least 500 flyers around the county, searched into the night and set up a few game cameras in spots where Katie had been spotted.

She described Katie as a high-maintenance border collie who was friendly toward people, but also very skittish and wouldn’t approach them, adding to the challenge of tracking her down.

“I never gave up. I never lost hope,” said King, who quit her job as a postal worker to continue her search for Katie.

Complete strangers helped keep her spirits up throughout the lengthy search, sending encouraging texts and Facebook posts — and even dropped off food for her.

“I think what I got out of this was the kindness of strangers,” she said.

It was that very community that eventually brought Katie home.

When I flagged this article back in September of last year, I was unsure about it being big enough to work as a movie. Once I started to think about it more, the story opened up into more than just a search movie:

• The husband-wife relationship, the emotional ups and downs, the experience of the search revealing hidden points of emotional disconnection and connection
• The kindness of strangers with whom the couple intersects on their journey
• The growing social media storm as people get on board the effort to find the dog, the transformative effect the effort could have on small communities in that region
• And, of course, cross-cutting between the humans’ search and the missing dog’s journey

It’s like Homeward Bound, but with the humans having an active role.

At the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, I saw a movie called Dream Horse. Plot summary: Dream Alliance, an unlikely race horse bred by small town Welsh bartender, Jan Vokes. With no experience, Jan convinces her neighbors to chip in their meager earnings to help raise Dream in the hopes he can compete with the racing elites. Here’s the trailer:

It’s a lovely film with quirky small town characters whose lives are transformed by a horse. I could see something similar in tone with this story.

There you go, my 15th story idea of the month. And it’s yours. Free! What would YOU do with it?

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Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15

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.