A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 3
This is the fifth 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 opportunity to land writing gigs.
Today’s story idea: Father hires virtual assassin to deter son from playing video games.
Sick and tired of his son playing video games and not listening to him, a father in China decided to take matters into his own hands… well, sort of. Instead of sending his son off to addiction campor stripping him of internet and gaming rights, Mr. Feng chose to hire an online “hitman” to school his son.
Feng’s 23 year-old son, “Xiao Feng” started playing video games in high school. Through his years of playing various online games, he supposedly thought himself a master of Chinese online role playing games. According to his father, Xiao Feng had terrible grades in school because of his gaming habit; he couldn’t even land a job. He, however, says he simply couldn’t find any work that he liked. Feng was annoyed that his son couldn’t even tough it out for three months at a software development company.
Unhappy with his son not finding a job, Feng decided to hire players in his son’s favorite online games to hunt down Xiao Feng. It is unknown where or how Feng found the in-game assassins — every one of the players he hired were stronger and higher leveled than Xiao Feng. Feng’s idea was that his son would get bored of playing games if he was killed every time he logged on, and that he would start putting more effort into getting a job.
The obvious play here is father hires what he thinks is a virtual assassin, but it turns out to be a real hitman. Once the contract is set into motion, there’s no stopping the killer. Of course, this sounds to me like an action comedy with father and son forced to go on the run and into hiding, forcing the mismatched pair to fight through their interpersonal problems while fending off a killer.
If this were 1987 when high concepts ruled the day — assuming there were online video games at that time — I’d be tempted to go with the story angle above. But this is 2014. We live in a post-modern or even post post-modern world. So I will press myself to come up with a twist or two to elevate this story into something fresher.
For instance, what if we switch Protagonists and make him the virtual assassin. This is his gig. He gets paid top dollar by concerned parents and pissed off spouses to kill their sons, daughters, and mates online in the hope that the addicted gamers will stop going online. The Protagonist is a kind of video game savant, adept at almost every single online game universe, he knows every angle, every plot device in games, every potential movie, and when he’s locked in, no one can touch him.
So this is his life: Getting paid to virtually kill people. Not terribly satisfying, right? Needs to change, yes?
What would you do with this character?
What if suddenly, a real hitman — or better yet hitmen/hitwomen — come after him. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know who. He just knows that where he’s been living a life of virtual violence, the shit has officially gotten real. Somebody wants him dead.
Who? Well, that’s a mystery which we could play with. First thought: What if some of the gamers who the Protagonist whacked virtually online again and again hired real assassins to whack him? Or how about this: One of the companies that owns several of the online video platforms, seeing a dip in users due to the Protagonist snuffing a number of hard core users which created a viral message, “Don’t play that game, there’s some dude that will just kill you like that,” hires the killers to take out the Protagonist.
That still seems lacking, so if I went this route, I’d probably play around with what is reality. Taking a clue from Black Swan, is he actually being chased by real assassins, or has he gone so deep into virtual reality, it has become his reality.
Okay, it’s your turn. What would you do with mysterious orbs found in the Temple of the Feathered Serpent?
There you go: My third story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!
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.
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