A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 15
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: Public domain
Laws vary from country to country, but if a person, event, book is considered to be in the public domain, then from a writer’s perspective, it is free content, you don’t need to secure any rights.
You want to adapt “Romeo and Juliet” into a contemporary gang shoot-em-up love story, you can do that.
You want to turn Abraham Lincoln into a vampire hunter, you can do that.
Straight adaptation, genre bend, gender bend, whatever you want to do, you can do it with a public domain entity. Plus the added benefit: Pre-awareness.
Today’s story: Woman hits multimillion scratchcard jackpot 4 times.
She’s been dubbed the ‘luckiest woman in the world’ — and with good reason.
Imagine every grain of sand on the planet and then multiply the total by 18. Those are the odds-to-one that Joan Ginther has beaten by winning a multi-million-pound lottery not once, not twice, but four times.
But some people are wondering if luck ever came into her success at all.
The 63-year-old American won all her jackpots in the Texas Lottery’s high stakes scratchcard games. The cards cost between £12 and £31, and there are three $10 million (£6.2 million) winners among every issue of three million scratchcards.
She bought three of her winning cards from the same petrol station in the dusty border town of Bishop (population: 3,300), where she grew up with her doctor father. The fourth winning card was bought in the neighbouring town of Kingsville.
Her latest £6.2 million win took her lottery haul to almost £13 million. The winning streak started with a £3.3 million scoop in 1993. In 2006, she won £1.4 million, and two years later she struck gold again with £2 million.
The homely-looking winner is coy about her success, declining to explain why she thinks she’s been so fortunate.
As for the Texas Lottery Commission, its spokesman says ‘she’s obviously been born under a lucky star’, stressing he did not believe there had been foul play. But others connected to the gambling industry beg to differ.
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More tellingly, she is a professional statistician, a former maths professor with a PhD from elite Stanford University.
And this is where the peculiar nature of scratchcards comes into play.
Lottery companies love us to think that scratchcards — by far their most lucrative earner — are a random game. But, of course, they aren’t, if only for the simple fact that the companies need to control the number of winners.
They are the lottery ticket with the worse chance of winning because a computer-generated algorithm — set of instructions — is used to determine where to distribute the jackpot-winning numbers within each run of scratchcards they print, ensuring they are scattered around the region.
Called a pseudo-random number generator, it produces a series of apparently random numbers, which are, in fact — as Ginther may have discovered — a predictable sequence.
Work out the sequence, say experts, and a pattern in the numbers is revealed.
— —
Was she secretly working on a whole new — and rather more lucrative — set of numbers? Whatever the case — and Ginther has offered no explanation about her winning streak — she would not be the first maths wizard to get rich at the expense of the gambling industry.
Okay, I’m going to try really hard to stay away from my default comedy mode. How about this: It’s 21 meets Twister? An action crime thriller.
Imagine one of those multi-state Mega Lottery deals. The jackpot has grown to a record $200M. Entire country in a fever pitch. Meanwhile there are two teams of ‘scratch trackers,’ who like tornado trackers try and figure out where the next winning lottery tickets will be sold. Each has their own algorithms. Each has their own team of drivers, surveillance, front men/women, and leaders. This is how they make their money: Figuring out which gas station, convenience store and market will likely sell the winning ticket.
They are rivals. They know each other. They stalk each other. A certain amount of respect and loathing between them.
They also have this in common: A genius math person on their team. Let’s say Team Cadillac has Joanna. Team Mercedes has Ricky. Socially awkward. Seemingly only interested in the math involved in the chase, the money a secondary consideration.
I say seemingly because what if Joanna and Ricky have grown to admire each other through the calculations they see at work in their rival’s forecasting the winning ticket sales locations. Sometimes he has outwitted her. Sometimes she has bested him. That has led to them surreptitiously interfacing with each other on some super secret sophisticated internet network. And over time, they have fallen in love, even though they have never met.
Plus they are tired at being made fun of by the others, their contributions minimized, their mental acuity taken for granted. What if they conspired to string their respective crews, nabbed a huge payout, bought an tropical island somewhere, and lived together blissfully for the rest of their lives?
So instead of this being a story about the big chase to see who will win the $200M jackpot, what if that happens at the end of Act One? Only it’s Joanna and Ricky who shock their respective teams, sneaking away to the true winning location, meeting there, getting the winning ticket, and off they go.
Now it’s a chase movie. The two rival teams, both royally pissed and out for blood, joining forces to find Joanna and Ricky. Throw in some law enforcement types who now believe they evidence of illegal gambling activities also in hot pursuit. And here are two relative innocents and young lovers, using only their super-genius minds to try to outwit those following them… all the while carrying the winning ticket worth $200M.
There you go: My fifteenth 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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