A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 13

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: Obituaries.

When it comes down to it, people live extraordinary lives. And obituaries summarize those lives in nice, neat packages. This is an one I love and if I had 12 more hours a day in my life, I might pursue this as a spec script.

So if you’re stuck for story ideas? Just hit the obituaries in your local fish-wrap.

Today’s story: Is self-marriage for you?

“With this ring I me wed.”

Jennifer Hoes just celebrated her ninth wedding anniversary — to herself.

On her 30th birthday in 2003, the Dutch woman had a self-wedding, complete with cameras. While it would be premature to call it a trend, several people since then have taken the vows of self-marriage as a way of contractually binding themselves to matrimonial values.

Anderson Cooper’s talk show recently featured a woman who had wed herself, and even took herself out on dates. “I started discovering that the love I need, it’s in here,” Nadine Schweigert said, pointing to her heart.

She had a ceremony, she had vows, she had the whole nine because “I wanted to share that with people … it’s a form of accountability,” the 36-year-old South Dakota divorcee said.

For others, self-marriage is about working on ones’ self in the context of a relationship.

“I find it very hard to have to disappoint people for example, which can lead to being unfaithful to them and yourself,” said Hoes, an artist whose wedding in Haarlem, The Netherlands, made headlines nine years ago. “My motto at the time of my wedding was, ‘Life is a matter of shaping it.’ (In Dutch, the word for shaping and design is the same). And the subscript said ‘and try not to change what cannot be changed’,” Hoes said, adding that she wears her wedding ring daily.

Two years ago, Chen Wei-yih married herself in a small ceremony attended by 30 friends and family. The Taiwanese woman wore a white gown, carried a huge bouquet and broadcast it on Facebook.

“When I look back at my wedding, at the self-commitment now, I feel it is a thing to remind me that I should not betray myself in any way and any time,” Chen Wei-yih, who goes by Only, told HLN.

Okay, time out. This is a joke, right?

But self-marriage, just like other forms of commitment, can end in disappointment. In 2006, a Boston man who did it soon divorced himself, citing irreconcilable differences.“Sex became more and more infrequent and there were the calls from a mysterious stranger who would hang up as soon as I answered the telephone,” Roland Nigland was quoted as saying.

If you click on the last link, you realize that, yes, this is a joke. But then there’s this. And this. And actual certifiable this.

So I don’t know WTF. Real? Not real? But I do know this: There is a story here. One that’s maybe a movie.

Okay, here’s a take. Imagine a couple of man-children. Let’s call them Vince and Seth. Seth just dumped a girl. And almost immediately after she became unavailable to him, he found himself to be attracted to her again.

These testosterone dipsticks ponder the mystery of this phenomenon: Why is it if you can’t have someone, you really want them?

They peer around the world passing them by, one potential female mate after another, none of them paying any heed to our boys.

On cue, the Herald’s Call. Anderson Cooper on CNN interviewing a woman who has engaged in self-marriage.

Whoa, dude. If you marry yourself, then that makes you totally unavailable to women. Then they’ll want you.

Obviously they come to this conclusion with the assistance of copious amounts of drugs and booze.

A quick trip to Las Vegas where the guys serve as Best Man for each other as they marry themselves.

They go public, using social media, proudly proclaiming themselves as self-married.

Then they hit it. Club scene. Laundromats. Health clubs. Proudly displaying their self-married rings.

Hijinks and mayhem ensue.

Anything there?

How about you? What would you do with the concept of self-marriage?

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.

Comment Archive