Random Story Ideas

[Kwing]

So I've had a shitload of ideas that I've wanted to get down and really haven't had the chance to. I thought it might be a good idea to just have a thread to be a giant think tank for ideas, and to discuss how to get started in creative writing in general.

My main issue is that my writing has been almost entirely done in essays, letters, or walkthroughs. Over the course of my life, I've refined my writing technique to maximize the amount of information I can convey in the least amount of space. The problem with this is that stories aren't written so they can be finished immediately and allow someone to get back to what they were doing; they're meant to be enjoyed without the thought of time constraints being programmed into the story. When I write individual scenes, I usually sit down and write an entire scenario, then go back and add more details repeatedly until I have a decent amount of content. What I really suck at, though, is creating overarching plots and sequences of events, and allowing them to actually unfold rather than making graceless transitions from one chapter to the next. I think this is a common problem, as big name authors frequently switch perspectives during cliffhangers when immediately continuing the same perspective would produce the same problem.

Now I've voiced my concerns with my writing style I want to get a bit into some of the individual ideas I have:

Black Bill (novel or short story) - It is some hundred years past an environmental apocalypse. Weather conditions have continually intensified, and on a particular hot summer with temperatures around the world reaching upwards of 140F, rolling blackouts left billions of people to die of heat strokes with no air conditioning.
. Behind the scenes, an extremely wealthy sect of people have built underground biodomes to sustain life in the event of such a catastrophe. A gigantic sun-roof and a system of motorized mirrors allow an underground city to receive natural light and harness solar energy. There is a sizable population of blue-collar workers who were ambiguously offered jobs working in these domes in order to sustain its functionality. The quality of life is higher than one might expect from a post-apocalyptic setting, but it comes at the price of the average working class citizen working 80 or more hours in a week, continuing the pattern of western civilization producing creature comforts at the cost of increased labor.
. Among the upper class is a very small, secret population of individuals who use stem cells to remain biologically immortal. Most of these people are in their mid-hundreds, and a good number live in college dormitories, moving from city to city and assuming new identities to perpetuate the best years of a person's life. However, a main focus of the story is that the cast of villains is too large and diverse for the reader to have that love-to-hate villain. Works best as a novel because the story does not focus on visuals, and carries a complete set of information unto itself (I have an ending planned out.)
(There is a LOT more to this synopsis but I'm cutting it off here.)

NEiTHER (Anime) - A young man discovers he can reverse time. There is a statue in his town center. If he places burning incense in its hand, it will come to life and deliver a torturous, slow death, only for him to wake up at the beginning of the day, unharmed, and with a second chance to change the events of that day. The statue comes with many special rules - for instance, the living statue can only be seen by the person who activated it, and if multiple people activate it at once, only the first person to die will retain their memories when time is rewound. Moreover, if one dies from anything other than the statue, time is not reset at all and the individual simply dies. Excessive usage comes with a severe risk of PTSD and psychological trauma, but can be used to prevent fatal accidents, win the lottery, or outsmart people. Works best as an anime due to plot devices and cliches.

The Box (short story) - A married couple is celebrating their 50th anniversary. The husband has had a box for all 50 years, but has not let his wife see its contents. On the special day, he tells her that he will show her what is inside the box. In an instant, he shoots her in the stomach and takes a diary out of the box. He reveals that, despite never showing the slightest hint of a manipulative or abusive nature, he is a sociopath that has waited all this time to inflict as much suffering upon her as possible. The diary contains half a century's worth of his judgments and malevolence toward her, which he reads as she bleeds to death on the floor. Works best as a short story because... Well, it is.

Untitled (game) - A man wakes up in a cave with no memory of who he is. A woman is nursing him back to health, and informs him that the two of them are a couple that had been drafted into the military but had deserted. While fleeing, falling debris gave him a concussion. The punishment for deserters is the detainment of their close friends and family, so their next plan of action is to return to the city and rescue the girl's younger sister. Neither of them have any other family. The couple works together as a team to hunt and gather as the man regains his strength. Periodically they engage in combat training, with the woman assuring that, "When you're strong enough to beat me, we're ready to go back to the city." While infiltrating the city, the woman and her sister escape but the man is wounded. The woman deserts him, saying she has no choice. When he is captured it is revealed that he had other family himself, but the woman had not told him about them, fearing it would have made the mission more difficult. The main focus of the game is that the girl would serve as the only player for hours and hours of gameplay, only to have her ugly side shown at the end, utilizing the same atmospheric emptiness as Shadow of the Colossus. Works best as a game because gameplay is just as crucial to character bonding as dialogue.

Wolf's Clothing (Anime) - Someone breaks into your home, and you kill them in self defense. But what's this? Suddenly, you look like the man you just killed! This is the concept behind Wolf's Clothing. The main character is an average every-man who is now haunted by the face of a man he killed every time he looks in the mirror. What's worse, he now bears the form of a wanted criminal. As he is chased by the authorities, he accidentally kills and subsequently takes on the form of an officer. As he remains on the run, sightings of him lead to a paranormal investigator determining that his query is a shapeshifter. Meanwhile, the main character is looking to commit the 'perfect murder' in order to hide his tracks and start a new life. Possible story arc: At one point, a friend of his most recent victim approaches him and tells him he is terminally ill. Through a series of long discussions, during which the main character's true identity is revealed, the man decides he wants to be killed, so that he can be replaced with someone that will take care of his wife and family.

So yeah. Ideas for writing style? Ideas for these stories? If you want more details about any of them let me know, I probably have more shit in my oversized head.

[Kwing]

At 2/19/15 02:58 AM, Cordyceps wrote: This would make an okay concept for a series, but it really begs the question - how is all that discovered? How did he learn about the statue and about all the rules?

Probably another anime cliche. I'm grasping at straws here, but I imagine the main character witnessing someone killing themselves next to the statue, unable to handle the pain until the statue killed him. If this happened repeatedly, the area with the statue would have taboo urban legends surrounding it. Perhaps he has a friend who's really into the occult that tries experimenting with it. Perhaps that friend saves his life one day because he saw him die and went back to save him.

EDIT: Oh right, and the rules. The rules wouldn't be handed to the main character, it would be more interesting if they were discovered as he and a few other characters experimented with it on their own. The rule about other people using it is really common sense, since time is reset when someone is killed by the statue, and if one person is killed by the statue before another, time resets before the other person dies. The potential lethality of the statue could also be determined by deaths that occur close to it, mainly suicides. So the characters would be aware of what was happening to a limited extent but they wouldn't necessarily know why.

Getting more in-depth into the time mechanic, what I conceptualized is that time is not actually linear; when the statue is activated, the entire day is a nightmare, even though it was real life before. Between the activation and death, you are literally in a dimension that is neither real nor real - the plane of existence you're in can only be defined after you die, whether from the statue (it was a nightmare) or from other causes (it was real.) The whole 'fuck rules' theory is where the name NEiTHER comes from. Additionally, i is meant to represent the imaginary number i, and the nightmare world which is both real and unreal is coined the Nether by the characters.