A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 6
This is the 13th 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 13th 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:
Around 1990, writer Stephen Brill came up with this idea: “A self-centered lawyer is sentenced to community service coaching a rag tag youth hockey team.” That eventually became the movie The Mighty Ducks. That seemingly innocuous family comedy grossed $51M, not bad for a movie with a reported $10M budget.
Then came D2: The Mighty Ducks. Then D3: The Mighty Ducks. Then “Mighty Ducks”, a TV series. Then Mighty Ducks the Movie: The First Face-Off, a DTV animated movie. And then came this:
The Anaheim Ducks [formerly the Anaheim Mighty Ducks]. An NHL franchise. A professional franchise worth an estimated $188M.
All based on the fact that one day, a writer was walking around and came up with a story idea about a youth hockey team named the Mighty Ducks.
As I said… in Hollywood, story ideas are worth gold.
Today’s story idea: Mom, 48, stole daughter’s identity to start college, date young guys.
A Missouri mama is facing jail time after she admitted to stealing her estranged daughter’s identity in order to secure student loans, enroll in college — and pursue her sexy co-ed fantasies.
Laura Oglesby, 48, posed as her daughter, Lauren Hays, for more than two years in an elaborate scam that fooled both the federal government and locals in the small town of Mountain View.
In 2016, Oglesby applied for a Social Security card in Hays’ name, which she promptly received in the mail.
From that point on, Oglesby — who originally hailed from Arkansas and was then age 43 — assumed her daughter’s identity, saying her name was Lauren Hays and that she was only 22 years old.
The fraudster even started seducing unsuspecting men in their early 20s, who had no idea that Oglesby was almost two decades older than she said she was.
“Everyone believed it. She even had boyfriends that believed that she was that age: 22 years old,” Chief Jamie Perkins of the Mountain View Police Department told the New York Times.
But all good things must come to an end. Busted!
This seems like a pretty straight-ahead story concept in and of itself. One thing is missing from the story: The daughter. If the mom can pull off acting like a twenty year-old, you need a more active and overt threat to her secret being revealed. What better way to do that than by having the daughter around.
Here’s my thought on that: What if instead of a small liberal arts college, Mom attends a huge state school like the University of Florida at Gainesville. There are 52K+ students who attend the university. It would be easy for Mom to avoid intersecting with Daughter in a school that large. Also, the University of. Florida is known as a major party school.
Also this: Florida.
Generally known as the weirdest state in the country.
That’s the setup: Mom estranged from Daughter. Probably got pregnant as a senior in high school, so her Daughter is the reason Mom was unable to go to college. Now that Mom is an empty nester, she’s going to do what she always dreamed of doing, but never had the chance: party down in college.
Brings to mind this movie, doesn’t it?
Of course, the real reason Mom goes to college is to track how Daughter is doing and eventually bond with her. But how to do that while maintaining her distance and the ruse of newfound identity?
One issue: Why take on the daughter’s identity in the first place? Why not just go to college as the Mother? I did a bit of problem-solving and came up with this: The Mother’s academic record in high school was not good. Maybe she never even graduated. Her daughter after graduation changed her last name, adopting her father’s surname — this another way of distancing herself from Mother. So, Mother conveniently uses Daughter’s “old” identity to slip into a “new” life. Hijinks, mayhem… and perhaps a Mother-Daughter rapprochement ensues.
There you go, my 6th 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.