A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 1

This is the eighth 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. For today, the most basic one:

If you have aspirations of becoming a professional screenwriter, you should be in the habit of generating story concepts.

Let’s say you write and sell a spec script. Congratulations. You’re the “flavor-of-the-week.” Your agent and manager set up meetings across Hollywood with producers and studio execs. The first words out of their mouths will likely be some variation of “Love your script ” (even if they haven’t really read it). The second thing they say will almost assuredly be, “What else have ya’ got?” If you haven’t been developing other stories, that is likely to be a very short meeting.

There are many ways to generate story ideas. This month, I focus on one: Looking for ideas in news sources. Each of the items I’ll be posting for the next 30 days comes from a news site.

Today’s story idea: The Story of WHER, America’s Pioneering, First All-Woman Radio Station (1955).

Sam Phillips changed the course of music history with his label Sun Records, which gave us Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Roy Orbison and essentially the second half of the 20th Century’s pop culture. But he had a second act in a life where most people would have rested on their laurels. Although not as well known, Phillips helped the course of female liberation when he founded the country’s first all-female radio station WHER in 1955, bought with the money he received from selling Presley’s recording contract.

The studio, called “the Doll Bin,” was tiny, pink and purple and decorated with bras and panties hanging from a clothesline. “1000 Beautiful Watts” was the slogan, and though, yes, that’s a bit cloying to modern ears, in 1955 it was one of the first cracks in the wall of male media dominance.

You could write the story authentic to actual history a la Hidden Figures which could provide a writer cover due to that movie’s box office success.

While I’d enjoy seeing that movie, my mind spun in a slightly different direction. What if we used WHER as inspiration for a more fictionaized comedy with drama? The same central conceit: First radio station solely with female deejays.

But what if after the novelty wears off, the response has flat-lined. Looks like radio station owner is about to pull the plug on the entire enterprise when a new girl shows up on the scene. Let’s call her Loretha. She is a live-wire. A natural on-air talent. As soon as Lady L starts spinning records and delivering her high energy bits into the microphone, listeners go crazy. They love her! But here’s the thing…

Loretha is black.

So we’re not only dealing with misogyny as a looming opposition dynamic, we’ve also got racism. After all, this is 1955.

There’s also this: Since deejays are on the radio, their physical appearance can be something of a mystery. So a fun storyline for a writer to explore: Loretha getting more and more famous via her radio stints, but they have to keep her identity hidden due to her race.

I can totally see this movie. But you know what? I’m not the person to write it. I think a woman needs to run with this.

It’s FM meets A League of Their Own meets Hidden Figures.

There you go: My first story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

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.

For the entire 2017 Story Idea Each Day for a Month series, go here.

See you in RESPONSES. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.