A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 26
This is the 15th 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…
This is the 15th 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: “‘Only Word for Them Is Heroes’: How 2 Students Rescued Dozens in Sudan.”
In the first days of Sudan’s war, the two university students felt helpless.
They locked themselves into their apartment in the capital, Khartoum, glued to Twitter as the battle unfolded. They winced as the walls shuddered from blasts and gunfire, taking shelter in the corridor. They wondered where Sudan was going.
On the fifth day, April 19, the phone rang: Someone needed a taxi.
A senior United Nations official, a woman in her 40s, was trapped inside her home in an upscale neighborhood, the caller explained. Her situation was desperate. Pickup trucks mounted with machine guns stood outside her building, firing at warplanes that zoomed overhead. Black smoke was streaming into her apartment following an airstrike nearby. She had run out of water. Her cellphone battery was down to 5 percent. Could they rescue her?
The students, Hassan Tibwa and Sami al-Gada, in their final year of mechanical engineering, had a side gig driving a taxi. But this call wasn’t a paying job — it was a mercy run. Mr. Tibwa phoned the woman. “She was screaming,” he recalled. “We had only a few minutes before her phone died. She was on her own.”
They jumped into Mr. al-Gada’s car, a dinged, seven-year-old Toyota sedan, and set off into the city, horrified at its transformation. Bullet holes pocked buildings. Charred vehicles littered the streets. Fighters were everywhere.
Crunching over bullet casings, they navigated a gantlet of check posts manned by jittery fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, some wearing bandages or limping. The fighters scanned the students’ phones and peppered them with questions. It took an hour to travel four miles.
“We went through hell,” Mr. Tibwa said.
They found the U.N. official, named Patience, alone at her apartment in an apparently deserted building. She had been hiding in her bathroom for days, slowly depleting three cellphones, she said, showing them a scatter of bullet holes in her living room wall.
The students consoled her, wrapped her in an all-covering abaya robe, and devised a cover story: Their passenger was pregnant and needed to get to a hospital. They paused to say a prayer. “We knew that the moment we stepped out, there was no going back,” Mr. Tibwa said.
Forty-five minutes and 10 check posts later, their Toyota pulled up outside the Al Salam, one of Khartoum’s most expensive hotels, now a five-star refugee camp. Patience wept with relief. After collecting herself and checking in, she sat the students down to ask an urgent question.
Could they go back and rescue her friends too?
Many remarkable aspects of this story, but one in particular stands out: The pair kept putting themselves in harm’s way by going back into a war zone to rescue people.
That doesn’t lend itself to a movie. A more conventional approach would be to focus on one rescue mission where the pair develop a deep relationship with the person they’re rescuing. Create a complex set of roadblocks and complications they must overcome in this singular journey.
But is there a way to structure a movie which dramatizes multiple rescues? Not sixty, but perhaps three. Each rescue more dangerous than the previous one. The narrative stitched together by the respective psychological journeys of the two rescuers. One growing more fearful, the other with a seeming death wish.
Whatever the approach, there is something about the selfless heroism of these two young men.
There you go. My 26th story this month. Free for you to take and write.
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
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Day 24
Day 25
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.
Let’s say you’ve found a story concept from an article in this series. Or you have an idea of your own, but you’re at the very beginning of the story-crafting process.
How to develop, then write it as a screenplay?
May I humbly recommend my book The Protagonist’s Journey: An Introduction to Character-Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling.
Hundreds of people have sent photos of my book. Here’s one.
The book is structured to provide writers an approach to the story-crafting process grounded in immersing oneself in the lives of the characters (Parts I and II). Then Part III presents a stage by stage approach to break story: from concept to outline.
Go here to read endorsements from dozens of professional screenwriters, authors, and academics.
You may purchase The Protagonist’s Journey here:
Come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.