The above super-condensed plot of the Odyssey came from the Book-A-Minute Web site, BTW.
FisherQueen, when clicking on your link, my computer suddenly tries to acces my A:-drive. I normally consider that to be the sign of a virus or other nastiness. Are you sure the site is safe?
Two guys out swimming off the shore of Florida. Big egos take over and they have a “chicken” contest where they swim side by side toward the horizon. The first guy to turn back loses.
You can decide where the story goes from there.
Thanks, FisherQueen!
“My main character/protagonist is a female. My main character is a professional athlete. An archetype present in my story is Hunter. A key object or symbol in my story is a scrapbook. My story will be set in a parallel universe. My story is about guilt.”
Guilt’s good. As long as the archetype isn’t AHunter. Maybe if I lost the parallel universe twist…
You know, i just realized I have NEVER written a “serious” story. They have always been lightly comic.
I have (somewhere) a newspaper clipping that inspired this.
A man finds, in his attic, old bonds issued by the state in which he lives. He calculates their current worth to be in the billions of dollars. The state agencies are in a tizzy. He ends up owning the state.
If you’d like the original news story, I’m sure I can find it given sufficient time.
A horrible plague has wiped out the entire world’s population except two people: An intelligent, fun-loving woman and a racist, fundamentalist Christian man. They travel together even though she despises him (but doesn’t let it be known) looking for the other survivors she is certain must exist. He claims that the plague is God’s punishment and that they are a modern-day Adam and Eve, chosen to recreate mankind.
And then they run into a third survivor: a black man, with whom the woman falls in love.
Romance! Danger! Violence! Hatred! Intolerance! Blood and Stomach-Pills! It has everything!
A guy decides the best way to write a short story is to copy and paste from random internet forums and chatrooms, with occasonal clips from online news and sports sites.
After doing 20 or so splices, he begins to notice an odd theme running through the collection, and suddenly realizes he has the basis for a new manifesto.
He rejects the story idea and begins a new political party.
Then he’s assassinated.
Hah! Well, I’ll admit that the thought of cutting and pasting the movie cliches thread into a script crossed my mind.
No kidding, dropzone, it was only half a joke. Back in the 80’s when Commodore BBS’s were hot, my wife (whom I met on the BBS’s, by the way) and I were bopping about from board to board all hours of the day and night.
One particularly popular board had features in common with some of the zanier threads here.
The Sysop decided that since it was “her board” that she had copyright of all the goodies therein/thereon and was even considering a publication of some of the contents.
Needless to say, those of us who had contributed large amounts of the stuff protested loudly enough that the sysop backed down.
Whether such a copy/paste might work these days, with a few judicious name changes, might be worth the effort. There are some bizarre tales on some sites.
It’s amazed me that nobody has done a better job of turning some of this stuff into a movie. The only ones I have seen have been weak at best. “You’ve Got Mail” may be the closest to a decent try.
Just for a goof:
Aliens make peaceful contact with Earth, claiming to have travelled from thousands of light years away, using FTL (faster than light) starships. They give us some tidbits of advanced technology, and describe a really terrific Interstellar Fellowship that will bring us unimaginable benefits if we join it. The only requirement for membership is to achieve FTL travel.
The kicker, of course, is that it turns out the aliens themselves don’t actually have FTL, and don’t even know if it’s possible. They take decades or centuries to make voyages, using suspended animation, and make the same false offer to every civilization they find, in the hopes that somebody will eventually crack the problem.
Take this any way you like. You could have us astonish the aliens by succeeding (based on the idea that you’re more likely to accomplish something if you already know – or believe – that it’s possible). (In this case, we’d be the only species around that really has FTL travel, giving us an immensely advantageous bargaining position.) Or maybe we’d kill ourselves trying to do the impossible.
Probably a stupid idea. In any case, in my experience as an unsucessful writer, ideas are easy; the hard part is working them out into something readable.
Wow, Baldwin. Cool idea. Consider it stolen. q;}
Here’s a few ideas that’ve been swimming in my head for years but, due to various factors, have never and probably will never get around to using:
Idea #1: 200 years in the future, Earth is a virtual utopia and almost all of mankind’s major problems have been solved. The main character is a young man who, quite unlike the norm of the time, is obsessed with the history of war and human violence. The young man learns that he is suffering from a fatal disease, one of the few medical science has yet to cure. He decides that, rather than die a painful wasting death in a hospital, he would like to go out fighting in a massive battle. His quest brings him to a fringe island community of Luddites who have rejected modern technology and life in the "big city. (Which by this point in time describes most of the planet. The island’s inhabitants have been living there for generations and have only the vaguest notions of what the outside world is like. Using his encyclopedic knowledge of the psychology of human violence, he begins sowing the seeds of dischord amongst this idyllic but largely ignorant community in the hopes of inspiring an all-out battle/riot. He succeeds, but ends up surviving the ensuing chaos. He returns home to find that doctors have discovered a cure for his diease during his absence. He takes the cure and returns to his normal life, completely forgetting about the community he destroyed.
Idea #2: Proving to be far more than just a passing fad, the “reality” concept takes over all of television to the point where original programming of any kind is ultimately phased out. Instead, all televisions come equipped with cameras, and every channel is linked to a different television/camera. In this strange new world we find Mr. N.R. Cissus, who, quite against the odds (there are after all hundreds of millions of channels to choose from) happens upon his own channel and, while watching it, becomes unnaturally obsessed with his own televised image. He watches it 24 hours a day, without eating or sleeping, becoming increasingly ill. Ultimately, he loses his mind and rushes the television, hoping in his mania to pass through the screen that he might spend his life with the object of his affection - himself. He puts his head through the screen, killing himself. Viewers the world over are both horrified and amused by this shocking end to what had become the single most watched “program” on television.
Idea #3: A young man takes the hoary old adage “Write what you know.” to freightening levels when he decides to stalk and kill a young woman in order to bring greater authenticity to the novel that he is writing about a serial killer.
Idea #4: A man with dreams of being a great director writes an absolutely horrible and offensive screenplay - Afterbirth about an aborted fetus that mutates into a feral monster that chokes its victims with its prehensile umbilical cord - and, much to his consternation and bewilderment, finds trouble interesting anyone in it. This changes when a copy falls into the hands of a wealthy Pro-Life activist who, being as deluded as the younf writer and would-be director, sees the film as an effective piece of anti-abortion propaganda. The film is made and at the premier, the screenwriter and financier are chased down, tarred and feathered by an outraged audience. Only at this point does the young man acknoledge that maybe a movie about a killer fetus wasn’t such a great idea.
How about a Western short story? A HOT cowgirl-type woman rides into town, looking for her estranged uncle, who happens to be holed up at the hotel, a recent arrival himself. The sheriff has noticed these two strangers arriving in his bailiwick and determines to find out what’s caused his town to suddenly become the Rome that all roads lead to; unbeknownst to him, the town drunk (who is secretly working undercover for the Federal government) has decided to find out for himself what is going on. Meanwhile, two gunslingers have been sent (by the local corrupt cattle baron) to intercept the Hot cowgirl, retrieve some incriminating papers from her, and kill her, before she uses the incriminating papers to prove her father had been cheated out of his land by the corrupt cattle baron. . .
Just think of the possibilities!
An aspiring writer asks on an Internet message board for short story ideas and receives several replies, one of which piques his/her interest-- a short story about an aspiring writer who asks on an Internet message board for short story ideas and receives several replies, one of which piques his/her interest-- a short story about an aspiring writer who asks on an Internet message board for short story ideas and receives several replies, one of which piques his/her interest–