A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 3
This is the third year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work my through during this series of posts. Here’s another one:
Being able to generate original story ideas sets you apart from writers who can’t.
Some writers can do it. Others can’t. The latter is resigned to doing adaptations, rewrites or taking a preexisting idea and writing that.
If you can develop solid skills at generating good story ideas, you give yourself a leg-up on your competition creating another work angle for you.
Today’s story idea picks up with the language idea from Day 1 in this series: Talk with a dolphin via underwater translation machine .
A diver carrying a computer that tries to recognise dolphin sounds and generate responses in real time will soon attempt to communicate with wild dolphins off the coast of Florida. If the bid is successful, it will be a big step towards two-way communication between humans and dolphins.
Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between “bring the surfboard to the man” and “bring the man to the surfboard”, for example.
But communication in most of these early experiments was one-way, says Denise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Florida. “They create a system and expect the dolphins to learn it, and they do, but the dolphins are not empowered to use the system to request things from the humans,” she says.
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Herzing is now collaborating with Thad Starner, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, on a project named Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT). They want to work with dolphins to “co-create” a language that uses features of sounds that wild dolphins communicate with naturally.
First things first. In this era of Hollywood’s obsession with pre-branded content, when you talk dolphins, you are drawing on one of the most famous non-human names ever: Flipper.
It was a movie in 1963, a TV series from 1964–1967, came back as a TV series from 1995–2000 [co-starring a young Jessica Alba], and another movie version in 1996 [starring a young Elijah Wood].
In addition there is the 2011 movie Dolphin Tale which grossed $95M in worldwide box office.
Last but not least, there is the 1973 movie Day of the Dolphin, a sci-fi thriller:
Dr Jake Terrell, who has been training a pair of dolphins for many years, has had a breakthrough. He has taught his dolphins to speak and understand English, although they do have a limited vocabulary. When the dolphins are stolen, he discovers they’re to be used in an assassination attempt. Now he is in a race to discover who is the target, and where the dolphins are, before the attempt is carried out.
So you have dolphins as the center of a movie or TV series in every one of the last five decades except the 80s. That means every American from Baby Boomers to today’s youth have a story association with dolphins. That represents some pretty significant pre-branding. Therefore if you come in with a dolphin project, you’re likely to find some receptive readers.
What to do with the central conceit: Humans and dolphins learn two-way communication? Goodness, where could you not go with that idea?
Family comedy: Bored with endless training sessions, Sporkie, the world’s first 100% literate dolphin, escapes from captivity, then goes into hiding by living with a blue-collar fishing family. Think “Deadliest Catch” meets “E.T.”.
Drama: A teenager rendered speechless by a traumatic childhood event learns to talk again through the nurturing love of a literate dolphin.
Horror: You thought “Jaws” was scary? This time around, it’s a school of dolphins. They’re smart. They can talk. And they’re out to kick some human ass!
There’s your conceit: Literate dolphins! What would you do with it?
Tomorrow: Another story idea.
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