A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 5
This is the 11th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work my…
This is the 11th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work my through during this series of posts. Here’s another one:
Thinking up new story ideas keeps you on your creative toes.
If a part of your consciousness is attuned at all times to an instinct to look, hear and listen to everything as a possible story idea, you keep your general level of creativity engaged.
It’s the difference between being in your car and letting whatever is on the radio drift in and out of your brain barely processing it versus actively connected to the images and feelings the stimulus evokes.
This is not to say you shouldn’t have some QVT: Quality Veg Time. Sometimes you just need to shut it down. But if you elevate your awareness about generating story ideas, one thing you will discover is how much time you spend doing — essentially — nothing.
Even if you spend just a bit of that time actively engaged in the story-generation process, you enliven your creativity.
Today’s story idea: Modern Day Trainhoppers.
I didn’t stumble on this idea from a news article, but rather one of my students. I asked what he was going to do after graduation. He said, “Trainhopping.” Of course, I’d heard of this type of thing, but mostly from stories my mother told me about ‘hobos’ during the Great Depression. However, it’s evidently still a thing and there’s even a thing called a Crew Change Guide, an underground document with information about jumping freight trains in the United States.
Here’s a short 2012 documentary on the subject:
As far as a story concept goes, you could do a drama like the movie Wild: “A chronicle of one woman’s one thousand one hundred mile solo hike undertaken as a way to recover from a recent personal tragedy.”
In this case, the Protagonist journeys by rail across the country in search of meaning in her life. Then in my research, I saw this photograph:
What if this young woman — let’s call her Miranda — is running away from her past. She is a veteran freighthopper, well known in that community.
I want her to stumble into some sort of crime. It could be corporate malfeasance, something she stumbles on in her travels, illegal activities of a considerable nature in the dark of night. Maybe she’s witness to something or made out to be a suspect in a death of consequences and she is on the run.
Or what if there is someone killing freighthoppers, a vigilante or serial killer, and Miranda’s lover Rachael is a victim. Miranda is on a crusade to find and stop the killer before they kill again.
There’s something interesting about the train subculture. The idea that the Protagonist is part of a mysterious underground group, a cynic who through circumstances finds herself pulled into a much bigger story which she must resolve or else her life may be in danger.
Drama. Action Drama. Drama Thriller.
There you go, my 5th story idea of the month. And it’s yours. Free! What would YOU do with it?
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.