A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 24

This is the 10th year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life.

Monika Glennon has lived in Huntsville, Alabama, for the last 12 years. Other than a strong Polish accent, she fits a certain stereotype of the All-American life. She’s blonde. Her husband is a veteran Marine. Her two children, a boy and a girl, joined the military as adults. She sells houses — she’s a real estate agent at Re/Max — helping others realize their own American dream.

But in September 2015, she was suddenly plunged into an American nightmare. She got a call at 6 a.m. one morning from a colleague at Re/Max telling her something terrible had been posted about her on the Re/Max Facebook page. Glennon thought at first she meant that a client had left her a bad review, but it turned out to be much worse than that.

It was a link to a story about Glennon on She’s A Homewrecker, a site that exists for the sole purpose of shaming the alleged “other woman.” The author of the Homewrecker post claimed that she and her husband had used Glennon as their realtor and that everything was going great until one evening when she walked in on Glennon having sex with her husband on the floor of a home the couple had been scheduled to see. The unnamed woman went into graphic detail about the sex act and claimed she’d taken photos that she used to get everything from her husband in a divorce. The only photo she posted though was Glennon’s professional headshot, taken from her bio page on Re/Max’s site.

Glennon was horrified. The story was completely fabricated and she had no idea why someone would have written it. Someone on Facebook named Ryan Baxter had posted it to the Re/Max page; Baxter also went through Glennon’s Facebook friend list and sent it to her husband, family members, and many of her professional contacts.

“Sorry to be the one to let you in on this,” Baxter wrote to Glennon’s husband, Scott, in a Facebook message.

Glennon waded into the comment section on the Homewrecker story and wrote that it was completely fabricated. A woman named Amy responded skeptically, “Hmmm, so why would someone make up such an extravagant story?”

The story was re-posted on other sites, including one called BadBizReport.is where it has been viewed over 95,000 times. It quickly became the top search result for Glennon’s name on Google. Within a year, Glennon was experiencing the repercussions: Her number of listings dropped by half. She estimates that she’s lost $200,000 in business since 2015.

This is a modern day horror story. With social media being omnipresent, all it takes is one person with a grudge to ruin another person’s life. This story idea falls into The [Blank] From Hell category — in this case: The Stranger From Hell.

If this were a movie plot setup, where to go with it? Do what Glennon did: Try to find the person who was destroying Glennon’s life. In real life, the person turned out to be an ordinary woman. Glennon met with her and the woman ended up apologizing online.

However, there’s a dark twist to a potential movie: What if the aggrieved Protagonist suffers so much — broken marriage, job loss, friends and family turn against her — that by the time she finds her tormentor, the Protagonist wants revenge. And now SHE goes about destroying the life of the person who destroyed hers. Only not through social media. Rather physical retribution.

There you go: My twenty fourth story idea for the month. What would YOU do with this story setup?

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
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23

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.