A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 11
This is the sixth year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Last week I provided a daily explanation about why you should make it a habit to be generating story ideas. This week, I’ll give you some tips on how to come up with stories.
Tip: Halliwell’s Film Guide.
This is based on the anecdote I heard about Woody Guthrie. Having written 4,000 songs in his life, he was asked how he came up with so many melodies. His answer: “Well, I take a melody I like, and I change it a lil’ here, and change it a lil’ there, and I make it my own.”
Same thing with Halliwell’s. You can read a post I wrote about it all the way back in November 2008, how you can read through the 24,000 movie listings — each with a logline — then gender and genre-bend your life to creative bliss.
Today’s story: Miner Found Alive After 17 Years Underground.
A group of coal miners from the western province of Xinjiang, had an unbelievable surprise when the gallery they were excavating opened up on a section of an old mine, that was abandoned 17 years ago after an earthquake that caused some large sections of the tunnels to collapse. While they were exploring the galleries, they stumbled upon Cheung Wai, a 59-year old survivor from the 1997 accident, obviously in a rather bad shape. He was immediately taken to the hospital where a complete evaluation of his physical and mental states will be done over the next weeks.
The poor man had remained trapped underground with the bodies of 78 of his dead coworkers, after an earthquake of a magnitude of 7,8 hit the region and caused the wooden support structure of the mine to crumble and collapse. Somehow lucky in his misfortune, Mr. Cheung was saved by the fact that some ventilation duct still connected his underground prison to the surface, allowing him access to air that was sufficiently pure to keep him alive.
He managed to survive thanks to an emergency stash of rice and water, stored in an underground depot, conceived especially for this kind of case. The man complemented his diet by catching and eating the countless rats that populate in the mine, as well as collecting large quantities of some sort of phosphorescent moss, which constituted his only source of vitamins. Even though he was suffering from great physical and mental stress, he managed to give proper burials to all of his comrades, spending almost a year in this great selfless act.
Okay, the straight-ahead drama here is The 33 — “When a gold and copper mine collapses, it traps 33 miners underground for 69 days” — meets Cast Away — “A FedEx executive must transform himself physically and emotionally to survive a crash landing on a deserted island”.
I imagine you’ve got the same sort of Robinson Crusoe elements of the ingenious ways the trapped miner manages to survive over time. One big fork in the road: Do you open up the story to his fantasies and/or memories of his past life? Or do you keep the story completely contained in the mine? The latter would be a challenge to pull off for 90+ minutes. How to create a sense of narrative drive?
Well, we can take a clue from Chris Sparling who wrote Buried: “Paul is a U.S. truck driver working in Iraq. After an attack by a group of Iraqis he wakes to find he is buried alive inside a coffin. With only a lighter and a cell phone it’s a race against time to escape this claustrophobic death trap.” In this take, time is not so much about the longevity of the Protagonist’s experience, but a ticking clock as one means of physical support after another begin to be lost to him (e.g., air, water, food).
Then I had another thought: What if the earthquake not only traps the miner, it awakens something buried deep within the mine? You know, those creepy wall drawings the dude discovers…
Yeah, that thing? It emerges from a long winter’s nap. It’s pissed… and it’s hungry.
There you go: My eleventh story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free! What would you do with it?
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 (hit Reply to join the conversation). And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.
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