A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 17
This is the 12th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Because the best way to come up with a great story idea is to come up with a lot of ideas. And the best way to come up with a lot of ideas is to be proactive in sourcing story ideas.
Today’s story: Inside Russia’s deep frozen ghost towns.
Photographed from above, acres of snow engulf buildings as far as the eye can see.
Up close, the surreal details shine through; light fixtures adorned with intricate icicles, couches enveloped in snowdrift and sheets of ice spilling in from open doors, frozen in time.
These are the abandoned ghost towns towns that surround the coal-mining center of Vorkuta in Russia’s Arctic north, swathed in snow and ice following recent brutally cold temperatures.
Moscow-based photographer Maria Passer traveled to the area to capture how the extreme weather has impacted abandoned buildings.
The town of Vorkuta was an infamous Gulag labor camp from the 1930s to 1960s, with prisoners forced to mine the region for coal.
In the later years of the Soviet Union, people moved from across the USSR to the area for mining jobs.
“To attract miners to live in hard climate conditions the salaries here were really good,” Passer tells CNN Travel.
After the Soviet Union collapsed and coal mines started to close, the towns’ fortunes changed again. Faced with no job opportunities, many left the isolated region.
This migration has led to an abundance of abandoned structures in the villages around Vorkuta, which Passer has been photographing for the past three weeks.
“It’s really a tragedy that many people have to leave their houses and to go to live somewhere else,” she says.
“But these locations, they have an abandoned beauty. I’m trying to see this, and to show this, in my pictures.”
Sometimes a location can inspire a story. That’s what happened with my movie Alaska. My writing partner and I were fascinated by the state for many reasons, not the least of which of how big and unexplored it is. Then we watched a documentary on polar bears and that became a part of the story. Is supplied the relocated family (given my background as a military brat) and the father being a bush pilot (my father was an Air Force pilot). Put all that together and you get the basics of the movie:
When images of the frozen, abandoned town of Vorkuta entered my social media timeline, I immediately thought: Story! I mean look at these drone images I found online:
With all that white, doesn’t it look like a ghost town? What’s more, apparently there is still a handful of people living there! How? Where do they get food? How do they stay warm? How has the harsh living conditions affected them?
Perhaps… it’s driven the mad.
Thus my story begins. Let’s imagine a small airplane. Seats six. The pilot is flying five employees of a big Russian petroleum company to Vorkuta. The employees range from upper management types to scientists to videographer.
As they soar over the endless frozen wasteland of upper Siberia, we learn geologists have discovered a massive underground oil field completely untapped and ready for development. The fact the geologist team disappeared is of less concern to the company than the possibility of quite literally trillions of rubles.
The videographer relates a legend about Vorkuta. For decades, a labor camp reported to be the harshest of all gulags, the folklore is that ghosts of deceased prisoners still roam the abandoned town’s buildings.
Heads shake. Ridiculous. Old wives tales. But then..
Just as the airplane gets within sight of Vorkuta, the engines cut out. The plane’s electrical system has completely shut down.
The pilot yells, “We have to ditch! Hold on!”
It’s a crash landing, the plane skidding right up to the very edge of the town’s boundaries. Everyone has survived the crash with the exception of the poor pilot who was speared through the chest by a pole attached to a sign which reads (in Russian), “Welcome to Vorkuta!”
The situation is complicated because for some unknown reason, neither their satellite phones or laptop computers can gain access to the internet. They are stuck until they can figure out how to contact someone to rescue them.
They better hope that happens soon as we see (but they don’t) shadowy figures appear in the top floor of what should be an abandoned building. They peer out the window at the visitors. Then in a weird series of grunts and hand gestures — what is with those scabs on their skin? — the figures laboriously shuffle to some crudely crafted weapons. Steel spears. Decades old rifles. And a set of gnarly looking harpoon-like units.
The shadowy figures make their way toward the stairs and being their descent to the front door…
There you go, my 17th story idea of the month. What would YOU do with it?
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
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.
