A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 23

This is the seventh year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: 93-year-old man building aircraft on his own.

As a teenager, Russell Solheim would hop on his bike and try to fly alongside the World War I-era planes passing over Sturtevant. When he wasn’t trying to fly, he’d spend his time creating model planes, based on what he’d seen in the skies.

Today, the 93-year-old Racine resident is trying to build a life-size model.

With each passing year, Solheim attempts to touch the sky with his flying car, a one-man vehicle that could ideally take to the roads and air.

Russell Solheim and his flying car

Solheim patented his design in 2001 and has been building and refining it ever since. He believes he is done building the flying car. Now he has to run some experiments and get it off the ground.

Echoes of my favorite Pixar movie Up. Let’s see what we can brainstorm for a story setup.

Carl in Up is a widower, so what if we went the opposite direction? Russ is a lifelong bachelor. A lifelong dreamer of big things, he has invented and patented dozens of items like the Chork (chopstick and fork), edible spray paint, an egg cuber, twirling spaghetti fork, and the like. The revenue from his inventions, although meager, has been enough so that he’s never had to work a traditional job a single day of his life.

What this also means is that Russ is socially awkward and terribly shy. The person with which he carries on a majority of his conversation is… himself. He talks aloud all the time, asking questions, then answering them, giving himself a hearty congratulations when he does well, offering a pep talk when he’s feeling blue.

Now in his 70s and facing down the prospect of his inevitable death… with no remaining family members and only a handful of people in his neighborhood who even know the slightest bit about him… Russ finds himself in the midst of his Great Project: To build a flying car. This will be his legacy. This will be a thousand times more important than all of his many inventions up to this point combined.

Something happens. What could be the Call To Adventure? What if a new neighbor moves in? Let’s call her Lynn and she is a 36 year-old, multicolored hair, tattooed, divorced lesbian. She inherited the place from her grandmother, the house having sat vacant for a few years after the old lady passed away. Russ enjoyed that, one less distraction on that side of his house. But Lynn is a bombastic type with an affinity for heavy metal music while she works on quilts, her one solid skill set. She has straggled back to this tiny Midwestern town, her tail between her legs, a failed marriage, a lost job, and a heavy daily habit of pot-smoking.

Where to go with this? One scene I’d like to see — some time in Act Two — is Lynn corralling Russ to travel to the nearest city and visit a gay bar on lesbian night.

I am thinking Lynn develops a strong curiosity in Russ’ flying car, sneaking into his workshop in his back yard. Perhaps over time, needing help with some tough final mechanical tasks, he is forced to ask for Lynn’s assistance.

Is there an invention competition? Maybe after a successful flight, a wealthy inventor swoops in to buy the rights to Russ’ flying car.

I just had this thought for an ending: The rights to his invention stolen out from underneath his nose… and both he and Lynn severely depressed… what if they take off for one final flight, soaring higher than the aeromobile has gone before… with the intention of crashing in an open field and committing joint suicide…

They crash… then out of the wreckage, they emerge. Miraculously they both survive. They sit among the wreckage, dazed, bruised, and bloodied. Russ peers at Lynn. Lynn blinks at Russ. “How about a drink,” she asks. Russ offers a little smile.

Cut to the gay bar where the whole place is dancing to some raucous disco tune, Russ and Lynn grinning from ear to ear.

There you go: My twenty third 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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