A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 5

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:

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 is something I saw yesterday, so I decided to slot it in here: U.S. Navy Program to Study How Troops Use Intuition:

The United States Navy has started a program to investigate how members of the military can be trained to improve their “sixth sense,” or intuitive ability, during combat and other missions.

The idea for the project comes in large part from the testimony of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who have reported an unexplained feeling of danger just before they encountered an enemy attack or ran into an improvised explosive device, Navy scientists said.

“Research in human pattern recognition and decision-making suggest that there is a ‘sixth sense’ through which humans can detect and act on unique patterns without consciously and intentionally analyzing them,” the Office of Naval Research said in an announcement late last month. The scientists managing the program — which the the naval research office is calling “revolutionary” — commonly refer to this mysterious perception as feeling one’s “Spidey sense” tingling, after the intuitive power of Spiderman.

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“There is a growing body of anecdotal evidence, combined with solid research efforts, that suggests intuition is a critical aspect of how we humans interact with our environment and how, ultimately, we make many of our decisions,” Ivy Estabrooke, a program manager at the Office of Naval Research, said in an e-mail.

“The whole goal of this research endeavor is to determine if we can develop techniques to measurably improve intuition,” she added.

Okay, I know there was the movie The Men Who Stare At Goats:

http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=SUrY

But aren’t there other ways to go with this central conceit? Like Neo in The Matrix when deep into his training he can anticipate an opponent’s moves or the new Sherlock Holmes movies which visualize him ‘seeing’ a series of his enemy’s actions before they happen, is there a cool-ass variation of this for an action movie?

Or what if you genre-bend it: A romantic-comedy about a guy [or girl] who develops the uncanny ability to see into the immediate future. Remember how funny it was in Groundhog Day when Phil could frame each day to slot into Rita’s expectations — he could play piano, recite French, carve ice sculptures? That was all based on (1) discovering what Rita liked then (2) off-camera learning how to do those things. Well, what if this happened pretty much in real time?

How about this: A competition between two guys vying over the same girl, each of whom has been zapped with this intuition ability. Wouldn’t one of them try to increase their intuitive abilities? Then the other one top that? That could lead to some sort of brush with insanity or death.

Or an off-beat indie drama-comedy exploring both the ups and the downs of what it is like to have this ability. I mean think how crazy it would be if you were always one or two steps ahead of everybody else. You could never fully live in the present. Plus everybody and their cousin would hit you up for their own desires: Take you to the race track to bet on the horses, use you to coach them through a worrisome conversation by seeing ahead of the other person.

There are a lot of movies with something similar to this idea including Minority Report, but that doesn’t mean that all the good ones associated with the conceit have been taken.

Is there anything here? What would you do with this conceit?

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