A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 11

This is the fourth 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: Wrongfully Convicted Man Is Free At Last After 17 Years:

When Lamonte Armstrong stopped in a drug store early one Sunday last month, he watched curiously as the clerks hovered over the pages of a newspaper.

The 62-year-old peer-support counselor had just finished up a graveyard shift at Freedom House, the recovery center he’s worked at since 2012. He was tired but intrigued as he approached the counter.

The clerks were engrossed in The News & Observer’s story of Joseph Sledge, whose murder conviction 34 years ago seems to be unraveling with recanted testimony and new DNA evidence bolstering his claims of innocence.

“I looked at the clerks, and I said, ‘I know that man,’” Armstrong recounted. “‘You know how I know him, because the same thing happened to me.’”

Armstrong spent 17 years in prison, some of it with Sledge.

Armstrong was wrongfully convicted of murdering an N.C. A&T University professor found dead in her Greensboro home in 1988. He maintained his innocence throughout — from the first time Greensboro police interviewed him to a Guilford County jury returning a guilty verdict to his arduous appeals of his life-sentence.

Duke University’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic took up Armstrong’s case more than seven years ago and helped spur his release last June with a vacated conviction.

But it was not until March 18 — the day after his conversation with the drugstore clerks — that Armstrong learned the murder case against him was dismissed. He no longer faced the possibility of another trial or another wrongful conviction. He finally was free — and overwhelmed.

“It’s been real up and down,” Armstrong said recently while waiting outside one of the many law school seminars he’s participated in since his release.

Happiness. Anger. Relief. Disbelief. A whirl of conflicting emotions occupy the mind of the father and grandfather builds a new life outside prison walls.

I want you to think on this. Imagine if you had been wrongly convicted of a crime, then sent to prison for decades. Mr. Armstrong appears to have come out of the experience with a relatively sanguine perspective.

But what if you had a different reaction. What if you were outraged? What if every day for 17 years while stuck in a 5x7 prison cell, a festering feeling grew and grew in you, morphing into a goal: If you ever got out, you were going to seek revenge against every single bastard who had been involved in putting you behind bars.

In order to accomplish your goal, you would need two things: First get out of prison. Second obtain the wherewithal to dispatch your victims.

Hm. Where could one learn such tactics and train to become a killer. Why, I can’t think of a better place than a prison!

So day after day, you trained to become a killer. No guns. No knives. Just your brains. Your strength. And your hands. You’ve decided to make each act of retribution direct, personal… and painful.

Then low and behold, the nice people at the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, after years of working on your case, finally get it overturned.

Now here you are… striding out of prison… a killing machine… with a list of names seared into your memory.

Revenge movies work for a reason: They are cathartic in part because they work within a story universe that is entirely black and white. Justice served up cold to wrongdoers. The aggrieved party engaging in righteous acts of retribution.

This story: The Shawshank Redemption meets Death Wish.

That’s my take. How would you approach this story?

Another idea for you. And it’s 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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