A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 30

This is the 13th 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: Mutiny on the Sex Raft: How a 70s science project descended into violent chaos.

When Santiago Genovés set sail across the Atlantic with 10 attractive people, he didn’t foresee hurricanes, epiphanies and murderous scheming.

In 1973, Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés set out to test a hypothesis. He had been struck by the connection between violence and sexuality in monkeys. “Most conflicts,” he noted, “are about sexual access to ovulating females.”

But would this apply to humans, too? To find out, Genovés asked a British boat builder to make a 12x7 metre raft called the Acali on which he planned to sail with 10 sexually attractive young people across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to Mexico. It was like a prototype for the glut of reality TV shows since, a Floating Love Island or Big Brother at Sea, but with a twist — the participants were so isolated from the rest of the world that it would have been futile to cry: “Get me out of here!” The only ways out were drowning or getting eaten by sharks.

Genovés was a veteran of extreme rafting. A few years earlier he had been one of the seven-strong multinational crew on Thor Heyerdahl’s two Ra expeditions to sail reed rafts, like those used in ancient Egypt, across the Atlantic. The Norwegian adventurer wanted to show how people of different races could cooperate effectively.

Genovés had even grander motives in planning his voyage: he sought to diagnose and cure world violence. To that end, he placed ads in international newspapers and made his selection from respondents, choosing a crew of strangers from different races and religions so that he could create a microcosm of the world. Among the five women and five men were a Japanese photographer, an Angolan priest, a French scuba diver, a Swedish ship’s captain, an Israeli doctor and an Alaskan waitress who was fleeing an abusive husband. Genovés called his boat the Peace Project, but it rapidly became known in the world’s press as the Sex Raft.

This is a crazy story I’d somehow missed. I mean… Sex Raft? As the article suggests, the whole experiment reeks of reality TV. All the way back in 1973.

Here is the trailer for the 2018 documentary The Raft:

For more background on the story, you can check out this video:

My story stands in the grand Hollywood tradition: Rip off a true story. Contemporize the whole thing. In fact, you could even add a science fiction element: As the last dry land disappears due to the melting of the global ice caps, a group of twelve strangers, desperate to keep from drowning, find themselves on a stranger’s boat. Sex, mayhem, and violence ensue.

Or set the story in a space ship. Or a remote equatorial island where a group of strangers, each suffering from financial instability in their lives, are invited to spend a “week” with a “generous benefactor.” Same thing: Sex, mayhem, and violence arise.

And there you go! My 30th and final story in this month’s series. What would YOU do with it? Other stories in this year’s A Story Idea Each Day for a Month:

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
Day 26
Day 27
Day 28
Day 29

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.