A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 5

This is the seventh 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:

Thinking up new story ideas keeps you on your creative toes.

If a part of your consciousness is attuned at all times to an instinct to look, hear and listen to everything as a possible story idea, you keep your general level of creativity engaged.

It’s the difference between being in your car and letting whatever is on the radio drift in and out of your brain barely processing it versus actively connected to the images and feelings the stimulus evokes.

This is not to say you shouldn’t have some QVT: Quality Veg Time. Sometimes you just need to shut it down. But if you elevate your awareness about generating story ideas, one thing you will discover is how much time you spend doing — essentially — nothing.

Even if you spend just a bit of that time actively engaged in the story-generation process, you enliven your creativity.

Today’s story idea: The Lost-Jewelry Hunters.

On a picturesque fall afternoon, Keith Wille pulled into an unfamiliar driveway in eastern Connecticut and popped his trunk. He removed a “digger” (a heavy-duty bladed spade), an XP Deus wireless metal detector, and a White’s Bullseye II pin-pointer, a hand-held wand that vibrates or chimes when it’s near metal. Wille is twenty-eight and a member of the Ring Finders Directory, a group of metal-detection enthusiasts dedicated to recovering lost things at little or no charge. He had arrived at the home of Jim Flynn, who had e-mailed him three days before, asking for help.

After the two men were introduced, Flynn led Wille to a spot at the back of his newly sodded lawn, explaining that he had been stuffing hay — mulch for the young grass — into a black trash bag, when, he said, “I could sense something didn’t feel right.” He looked down at his hand. His platinum wedding ring was gone. “That was a sickening feeling,” he said. The band was insured, but money wasn’t the point. “My father had the same ring his whole life. I’d hate to be the person who got a second one.” His four-year wedding anniversary was days away. He dumped out the hay, and he and his wife and toddler scoured the lawn on their hands and knees, without success.

The directory was started in 2009 by Chris Turner, a former professional soccer player from Vancouver, British Columbia. To date, it has three hundred and thirty-six members, spread across twenty-two countries and most of the United States. Since the group started, its detectorists have recovered about twenty-six hundred objects from parks, lakes, beaches, yards, and snowdrifts. The majority of calls are for rings, keys, and cell phones, but some finders have searched for time capsules and burial urns. Turner estimates that his members have an eighty-per-cent success rate.

Though the Ring Finders Directory is technically incorporated, it isn’t really meant to make money. Yearly membership dues start at $39.99. The members are all independent contractors, and almost all of them work on a reward basis, asking only for a guarantee of gas money. No one makes a living at it, and the rewards can vary widely. Turner, who works as a stand-in on film and television productions, reports having received a loaf of homemade banana bread for one find, and two thousand dollars for a set of rings that he found in a snowy mountain pass in the Colorado Rockies. Some Ring Finders have also been hired by insurers; in 2011, two members from Minnesota negotiated a rate based on a percentage of the value of their quarry, and made more than eighteen thousand dollars after retrieving a ring worth sixty-two thousand dollars.

I love this idea. I was tempted not to post it and work up something on my own, but it feels like an indie movie and I’ve had a hard time getting things going in that space the last few years.

This is a great example of starting the story-crafting process with nothing more than a character: A jewelry hunter. Just that. Where can we take this character?

A comedy in which the Protagonist discovers some buried treasure and gets in over his head?

A thriller in which — same thing — the Protagonist makes a discovery, but now finds himself the subject of interest with some parties who are intent on silencing him… however they must?

A horror story in which the Protagonist uncovers something unspeakable and dangerous?

Many possibilities. ‘Hunter’ can be metaphorical. The Protagonist can be throwing himself into his discovery efforts while missing out on who he is psychologically. Perhaps he meets someone who manages to steer his investigatory skills on himself.

There you go: My fifth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Now it’s your turn. What would you do with this story setup?

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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