A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 18

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: These Millennials Got New Roommates. They’re Nuns.

A project called Nuns and Nones moved religion-free millennials into a convent.

BURLINGAME, Calif. — Sarah Jane Bradley was an unmarried, “spiritual but not religious” professional in her early 30s, with a rowdy group of friends and a start-up when she moved out of her communal house and into a convent.

A bunch of friends went with her.

They called the project Nuns and Nones, and they were the “nones” — progressive millennials, none of whom were practicing Catholics. Intended to be a pilot project, the unusual roommate situation with the Sisters of Mercy would last for six months.

The idea was spearheaded by Adam Horowitz, a 32-year-old Jewish man, and the pilot program was guided by Judy Carle, a 79-year-old Catholic Sister of Mercy in the Bay Area. Mr. Horowitz and his friends heard the call after a road trip to visit intentional communities. They were brainstorming ways they could live radical activist lives, lives of total devotion to their causes. They were trying to figure out who was already doing this, and when Mr. Horowitz talked to a minister, it came to him. The answer was nuns.

“These are radical, badass women who have lived lives devoted to social justice,” said Ms. Bradley. “And we can learn from them.”

These are also hard times for the sisters. The average age of a Roman Catholic nun in the United States is close to 80. Convents around the country are closing. The number of nuns in the United States has collapsed from 180,000 in 1965 to below 50,000 today. Sisters are passing leadership at Catholic hospitals and schools to lay people. Some have even begun talking about their mission here in America as being complete.

At the same time, millennials are the least religious group of people in America — only about 27 percent attend weekly religious services. Young women who aspire to lives of good works without the burden of a husband are quite able to do that now without Catholicism.

Yet for small pockets of the young, urban and progressive, the convent is calling. Their radical politics took them all the way around and back to the Catholic Church.

This has potential as a movie, but a one-hour TV dramedy seem a better fit? Character breakdown: 3 nuns, 4 millennials. Much of each episode would take place within the convent, however since the social justice work the nuns engage in takes them out into the world, combined with the millennials who have their regular jobs and social lives, there could be a nice balance between secular and non-secular environments.

Of course, they begin as strange bedfellows, but as one of the sisters in the article expressed in a haiku she penned:

Eek. What will I say?

I’m too old for millennials.

Surprise, we’re soul mates!

That last line lies at the heart of the series, how these people separated by religious upbringing (at least one of the millennials could be Muslim or Jewish), gender (at least one of the millennials could identify as male), and age become a kind of surrogate family for each other.

There you go, my 17th story idea of the month. 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
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17

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.