A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 5
This is the sixth 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 dark and dangerous world of extreme cavers.
On his thirteenth day underground, when he’d come to the edge of the known world and was preparing to pass beyond it, Marcin Gala placed a call to the surface. He’d travelled more than three miles through the earth by then, over stalagmites and boulder fields, cave-ins and vaulting galleries. He’d spidered down waterfalls, inched along crumbling ledges, and bellied through tunnels so tight that his back touched the roof with every breath. Now he stood at the shore of a small, dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone. He felt the weight of the mountain above him — a mile of solid rock — and wondered if he’d ever find his way back again. It was his last chance to hear his wife and daughter’s voices before the cave swallowed him up.
“Base camp, base camp, base camp,” he said. “This is Camp Four. Over.” His voice travelled from the handset to a Teflon-coated wire that he had strung along the wall. It wound its way through sump and tunnel, up the stair-step passages of the Chevé system to a ragged cleft in a hillside seven thousand feet above sea level. There, in a cloud forest in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, lay the staging area for an attempt to map the deepest cave in the world — a kind of Everest expedition turned upside down. Gala’s voice fell soft and muffled in the mountain’s belly, husky with fatigue. He asked his seven-year-old, Zuzia, how she liked the Pippi Longstocking book she’d been reading, and wondered what the weather was like on the surface. Then the voice of Bill Stone, the leader of the expedition, broke over the line. “We’re counting on you guys,” he said. “This is a big day. Do your best, but don’t do anything radical. Be brave, but not too brave.”
I am claustrophobic. So this idea scares the crap out of me from the get-go. It would be easy for me to explore horror-thriller with this one. Group of divers descend into a heretofore unexplored cave. Awaken some violent entity. But I’ve already tapped into horror a few times already in this series. Plus I had another thought.
The entire story is told through the perspective of one woman, the preeminent cave diver in the world. We meet her as she begins her descent into the cave. She is connected to the outer world via the same system as described in the article. We hear the voice on the other end — a man — and throughout the story, that is her only contact to someone other than herself.
As it turns out, this cave is world famous. In fact, the most well-known cave explorer in history (let’s call him Jacques) lost his life here. Reached a record depth, then just disappeared. His voice to the support team up top was there for one second. Then nothing but an awful sick silence.
Our protagonist is determined to break Jacques’ record and try to discover what happened to him. But there is more to her story. Something about her past is driving her to take on this seemingly suicidal, yet personal mission. A deep, dark mystery. And that backstory gets revealed as she descends lower… and lower… and lower.
Do we cut to flashbacks from her life? Maybe. Or perhaps we take a similar approach to the movie Gravity, staying with her the entire time.
But clearly, she is damaged goods. She probably has a death wish. And that leads her to make choices in her descent that defy logic. Yet the amazing things she discovers along the way… including Jacques’ fate…
It’s a drama thriller. Single character. Twists and turns in the labyrinthine cave. Obstacles. Blockades. Danger at every turn. Yet she presses on. All the while processing the failures of her life, death seemingly beckoning to her. Cave as metaphor for unconscious psyche.
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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