A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 19

This is the 15th year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story idea: “When This Professor Got Cancer, He Didn’t Quit. He Taught a Class About It.”

Dr. Bryant Lin stood before his class at Stanford in September, likely one of the last he would ever teach.

Just 50 years old and a nonsmoker, he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer four months earlier. The illness is terminal, and Dr. Lin estimated that he had roughly two years left before the drug he was taking stopped working. Instead of pulling back from work, he chose to spend the fall quarter teaching a course about his own illness.

Registration for the class had filled up almost immediately. Now the room was overflowing, with some students forced to sit on the floor and others turned away entirely.

“It’s quite an honor for me, honestly,” Dr. Lin said, his voice catching. “The fact that you would want to sign up for my class.”

He told his students he wanted to begin with a story that explained why he chose to pursue medicine. He picked up a letter he had received years earlier from a patient dying of chronic kidney disease. The man and his family had made the decision to withdraw from dialysis, knowing he would soon die.

Dr. Lin adjusted his glasses and read, choking up again.

“‘I wanted to thank you so much for taking such good care of me in my old age,’” he read, quoting his patient. “‘You treated me as you would treat your own father.’”

I found Dr. Lin’s story to be both moving … and inspiring. Moving in that it’s a story of a man confronting his own mortality in a unique way. Inspiring because he’s using his platform as a teacher to connect with young people who are fortunate enough to know him as students.

I pondered several different ways to approach writing a screenplay with this setup. I ended up with this.

A dying teacher creates his last class. It deals with death and his own terminal illness. Ten sequences, each one anchored by a class session (i.e., SQ1 = Class 1 excerpt; SQ2 = Class 2 excerpt). The in-class material would comprise 5 minutes. Post-class professor-student interaction 5 minutes.

The primary relationship: The professor and a student whose mother died of cancer. The student is lost in grief harboring significant anger and beneath sadness. In private, the student is plagued by depression and suicidal ideation.

The professor is single and has been cut off by his religious parents ever since he had announced to them he was gay.

The student is a loner. He cannot allow himself any of the meaningful social activities his peers engage in because to do so — in his mind — would be a betrayal to his mother’s memory.

Over the course of the film, these two individuals bond as they struggle to come to grips with their respective experiences of death.

The ending? I suppose the conventional approach would be a deathbed scene. I don’t. In my imagination, the professor leads the final class session, then meets outside with the student one last time. The professor is officially retired from his academic position and is heading into the final months of his life in hospice care in another state.

They say goodbye. The student watches as the professor shuffles off into the snowy night, passing under a street light, then his shadowy presence disappears into the darkness.

There’s my 19th story idea this month.

Previous articles 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
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18

Here are links to previous series:

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)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2022)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2023)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2024)

Note: The articles from 2010–2016 have corrupted URLs. I am in the process of cleaning those up.

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.