A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 3
This is the sixth 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:
Being able to generate original story ideas sets you apart from writers who can’t.
Some writers can do it. Others can’t. The latter is resigned to doing adaptations, rewrites or taking a preexisting idea and writing that.
If you can develop solid skills at generating good story ideas, you give yourself a leg-up on your competition creating another opportunity to land writing gigs.
Today’s story idea: Haunted island for sale.
In 2010, Ransom Riggs visited the island of Poveglia in the Venice Lagoon — also known as the most haunted island in the world. In April 2014, it was announced that Poveglia would be going up for auction in an effort to help reduce Italy’s soaring debt. Yesterday we learned that Italian businessman Luigi Brugnaro won the auction with a bid of €513,000 (roughly $704,000), which allows him to lease the island for 99 years. (A rival community group is asking the government to refuse his bid.) So what exactly does he get? Let’s take a look at Ransom’s photo tour from 2010:
A quarantine station, a dumping ground for plague victims, more recently a mental hospital — the tiny island of Poveglia in the Venice Lagoon has served many unpleasant purposes over the years, but today it stands empty, a crumbling collection of abandoned buildings and weeds run riot just two miles from the glittering palaces of the Grand Canal. Legends and rumors about Poveglia are nearly as pervasive as the weeds, and they read like a horror story: that so many people were burned and buried there during the black plague that the soil is 50% human ash; that local fishermen give the island a wide berth for fear of netting the wave-polished bones of ancestors; that the psychiatrist who ran the mental hospital was a butcher and torturer who went mad from guilt and threw himself from the island’s belltower, only to survive the fall and be strangled by a “ghostly mist” that emerged from the ground.
Some images to give you a sense of the creepy factor:
Yes, those are skeletons in the ground.
So who would buy a haunted island? Remember Tim from a certain Steven Spielberg blockbuster from 1993?
Little Timmy’s grandfather John Hammond created an infamous island dinosaur amusement park. What if as an adult, Tim went in a similar but different direction: Instead of velociraptors… ghosts.
Yes, my story take is Poltergeist meets Jurassic Park. The island a tourist destination for fans of the supernatural. First set of visitors starts out all fun and games. But then…
SHRIEK! GACK! AHHHHH! NOOOOOOOOO! And…
Silence. Deathly… silence.
How about you? What would you do with a story set on a haunted island?
There you go: My third story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!
Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.
See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.
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