A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 5
This is the 12th 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 12th 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: Abandoned $1.6 billion Missouri resort community goes viral.
It’s scarier than a haunted house — and way more expensive!
A spine-tingling ghost town of mansions in Missouri, which was supposed to become a $1.6 billion resort community, went viral on social media this week.
Spooky footage shows the large, crumbling abodes abandoned among overgrown plants at the Indian Ridge Resort in Branson — more than a decade after the housing market crisis, TikTok user @carriejernigan1 posted over the weekend.
“Have you ever seen a subdivision full of abandoned mansions?” she asks in the video, which had raked in more than 2.1 million “likes” on Thursday.
“This was supposed to be a 1.6 billion dollar resort community. It was going to have one of the country’s largest water parks, golf courses, hotels conference centers and shopping,” she said.
“But instead it turned into a ghost town when the 2008 housing crisis hit. Five people had ended up in federal prison. And 13 years later the houses just sit here.”
To give you some sense of the scope, here’s a wide shot:
Here’s extended video provided by a sleuth who explored the interiors:
Every year for this series, I manage to find at least a couple of potential horror stories, so here’s my first one in 2021.
What if we moved this site of abandoned resort mansions to a beautiful rural area just outside Chickamauga, Georgia. Located in northwest Georgia, the area is bordered by Alabama and Tennessee with the tip of North Carolina mere miles away. In fact, the proximity to major metropolitan areas such as Nashville and Atlanta was one of the primary reasons for the choice of this locale.
But the big reason: The Battle of Chickamauga, the 2nd bloodiest engagement between Union and Confederate forces in the Civil War. Taking place over three days (September 18–20, 1863), over 34,000 soldiers lost their lives with the Confederate forces turning back the Union army.
It is the fall of 2013 and the school year has recently begun at Fisk University in Nashville, an HBCU institution (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). Members of the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity have an activity planned for their pledge class: Seeing as it’s the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga… and that there is this creepy abandoned resort located near Chickamauga… and that Nashville is a short drive away…
Why not send members of the pledge class and the fraternity’s sister sorority pledge class to spend the night in the deserted resort?
I mean, what could go wrong?
Unfortunately for our group of ten college students, there’s a slight supernatural problem. For when they arrive on the night of September 18, 2013, one-hundred-and-fifty-years to the day of the beginning of the bloody Battle of Chickamauga, the moon and stars align so that rising up from their graves are zombie Confederate soldiers… back for more war!
This will become known as the Second Battle of Chickamauga, only this time, it’s not the Union army fighting the Rebel forces, it’s Black college students who are going to outwit, outsmart, and outdo the enemy…
And kick some Confederate zombie ass!
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.