Plot Ideas I Won't Use (But You Might)...

[steve]

I am (slowly) working my way back into working on a new story for this message board. No promises!

However, in doing so, I feel an obligation to finally release, into the wild, some post-apocalyptic-y ideas that I have had which I will almost, positively never get around to doing anything with. They're just too good to simply keep bottled up and, if someone else wants to take a crack at them... Have at it. I'd love to see what other writers do with them.

First up is not so much a twist on post-apocalypse but simply a change in location. A lot of PA is simply America-based (hey, what better to write about than what you know?) but the classic America-Russia or America-Soviet nuclear slugfest is a bit stale. Why not go for a more realistic scenario: India vs. Pakistan!

I'm not going to get into politics; This isn't a "Team India" or "Team Pakistan" thread but merely a plot idea to shift the post-apocalypse to the India/Pakistan/Asia region of the world. It's no small secret that India & Pakistan don't like each other much and that lack of live extends to this very day. Both countries are nuclear powers and both have itchier trigger fingers than even America & the USSR ever did.

I did some research into this scenario a long time back and the research provided a lot of good material for anyone interested in a PA story set in the wastelands of Mumbai or Islamabad. Throwing the whole Middle East back into the figurative Dark Ages (or having it spill over into China, Nepal, Bangladesh, Etc.) is a great way to freshen up an otherwise garden-variety PA story.

At any rate, if anyone is looking for an interesting new twist, there it is: Base your PA story in the Asian Wastelands of India/Pakistan.

Maybe more ideas later.

[steve]

Here's another PA idea that I did some research on but has passed me by. If you want to use it, that's perfectly fine with me.

The movie "The Blair Witch Project" popularized the entire "Let's shoot an entire movie using only Grandma's fancy digital camcorder." I won't get into the whole politics of why the movie made a whole boatload of money but it was one of those films that captured lightning in a bottle and, soon after, there were scores of similar movies. I'll admit it; The idea intrigued me and I decided to see if I could follow suit.

Now, previously, movie documentaries had also gotten a shot in the arm when Michael Moore innovated the typical documentary by personalizing it. I'm not here for politics; I understand that Michael Moore is a polarizing figure. However, it's undeniable that his new style of documentary had similar success in the documentary genre which continues on to this day even outside of movie documentary field. Documentaries were no longer necessarily about the topic; You watched them because of who was presenting it.

Finally, I decided to take a page from the movie "Pulp Fiction" (although other media had used the technique previously) and tell the story out of sequence. Telling a story out of sequence unsettles the reader but also makes otherwise benign passages suddenly seem strikingly relevant if the reader knows what's coming next. You're essentially creating a bit more mystery where it wasn't originally there.

From these ideas, I created a story concept of a woman who had made a career out of doing provocative things and turning them into documentaries. For instance, she would live for one year without driving (or riding in) a car or live for a year without speaking (although she could write and type). In the story, she was a minor celebrity in the documentary world, akin to maybe a Morgan Spurlock (without the #MeToo controversy). Her latest idea would be to live one year without (almost) any human interaction. She would live inside of a refurbished fallout shelter that would be large enough to store one year's worth of food. She would have no media except for what she brought in with her. Her producer would have a light that he would blink once a month and she would have to repeat the blinking light to ensure her safety, for legal and ethical reasons (in case of serious accident). However, she would otherwise be completely isolated.

The story would reveal that a terrible catastrophe had occurred in the real world, one in which she was entirely unaware until she decided to leave after the one year was up. During that time, though, she had already begun to crack up under the isolation and you would see that through multiple examples. Because of the catastrophe, the producer (and most likely everyone else) was dead and stopped the blinking light midway through the experiment which furthers her dementia. The catastrophe (as envisioned up until the project stalled) was a supervolcano, such as the possibility that Yellowstone National Park would erupt into one and pretty much place the entire world into a new Ice Age (at best) or destroy all of humanity at worst.

At any rate, I worked on the story for awhile, tinkering with how much dementia the woman would experience and what isolation does to people and the effects of a super volcano. The gist is that the woman really doesn't fare too well. Celebrities are extroverts and she inadvertently placed herself into an introvert situation and that really damages her psychologically. Some of the taped stuff is revealing and she starts having arguments with invisible people, walks around nude on camera and starts creating wild conspiracy theories (one of which turns out to be completely true, aka the super volcano) about what could be going on in the outside world. It was meant to be pretty embarrassing stuff.

From what I remember, she doesn't last too long in the "new" outside world and the very last segments are from a group of survivors who find her remains and her stuff and wonder how she lived for so long. I know there was, at one point, the possibility of her being eaten by human scavengers (and working in the ironic hook that she so badly wanted to go back to "meeting people" once she got out, only for those people to kill and eat her).

So why did this project stall? There's always a bunch of reasons. I think that one of them was that the concept just didn't translate well as a written story and was better suited for the screen. Another was that someone eventually did something similar in a movie (although at a bigger budget and a slightly different direction, with their emphasis on being what happened and mine more of a character study).

It's not a bad concept and I hate the fact that it didn't really go anywhere beyond a lot of research and some outlines. Now it's a bit obsolete and "been there, done that" but I kind of enjoyed working on it when it was still an active project.

[papaof2]

My forays into "something a little different" don't often get beyond the short or short-short story level. My "level of disbelief" meter sometimes pegs when writing and I know I can't support the storyline further - that also happens when reading other people's writings and is why I have a number of unfinished stories/books/etc by other writers. Not so much on specific topics as the total premise. There's one PAW book that I started and never got past the first chapter or so because the characters presented were so totally self-centered and useless that I didn't care whether they lived or died so I never finished the book. If it was the author's intent to have you not like those characters, then he/she succeeded too well in making them unlikable but he/she probably didn't want the reader's dislike to reach the extent that I skipped the book (and possibly others in a series - don't remember if there was more than one book).

If the characters are believable and the premise is adequately supported, I enjoy fiction of many types, whether a "whodunit" or something in the PAW world or something set on "New Earth" in 2856 or some "Potter" level of witches and warlocks.

We all have a "disbelief" meter of some type. For some it's the "That can't happen" about any disruption of food and utilities. Having been in the dark many times and having lived with my grandparents when in elementary school, I firmly believe in having the oil lamp (and similar) and the canned goods under the stairs (our pantry is in a different place but we have things for more than the next 3 days). Would the local hordes descend on any place with lights of any kind? I don't know yet, but I have answers ready in round nose lead bullets, hollow points and FMJ. If someone comes to the door and asks, I might offer a day's worth of rice and beans. If they're too good to eat that, they can starve, because that's what most of our provisions are - basic, inexpensive, long lasting.

We're not in the usual path of hurricanes or tornadoes but Camille didn't have a typical hurricane track and touched a lot of not-usually-affected areas, chewing up everything in its path as it crossed the continental US. Another hurricane like that is always a possibility but some people's "disbelief meter" would be pegged at "Impossible" if you suggested that as a possibility.

[steve]

Another storyline that was researched, outlined but ultimately abandoned could be considered an offshoot of the "Doomed Documentary" as noted above. I don't think that I ever gave this treatment a title but it could be considered "Doomed Reality TV show."

The reality TV show "Survivor" was an absolute runaway hit when it aired in 2000 and it kicked off the Reality TV genre. The participants on that show all became minor celebrities for a time and some are even considered Reality TV royalty to this day (for instance, Rudy Boesch, one of the finalists on the first Survivor, recently passed away and was widely reported as such).

It wasn't hard to take a television show that was located in an isolated area and turn that concept into a post-apocalyptic storyline. Turning a group of "pretend" survivors into actual survivors isn't a new concept but I figured that using it within the framework of a reality TV show was an original enough twist at the time to keep going with it. The setting was going to be in Eastern Europe (It's cheaper to film there) and the reality TV show was going to be about living in forested wilderness: How fast can you chop down a tree, to hike a trail, kayak down a river, etc. so forth. Of course, along the way, 'something happens' and the participants begin to suspect that something has happened for real and that they need to escape the wilderness for real.

I remember that the ending was going to be vague: Either something horrible really did happen, that the country was undergoing a coup and that, because it was an American show, that they were being hunted down as they were foreigners, or that it was all a part of an elaborate mind game. There would be various hints where all three endings could be valid. One interesting plot aspect that I had worked in was that the 'obvious' leader in the beginning (A real Brad Pitt, hunky, youthful, charismatic guy) began wilting under the pressure of leadership and an ordinary, balding, "older" (as in early-to-mid 40s) man was being looked up to instead by the end of the story.

I remember that something that I really wanted to add in was the group killed an outside person for real and this was where the story really turned and where hunky Brad Pitt wilts and the older man begins to really take over the group. I wanted that moment to be one of the essential pivot points of the story because now the story turned serious and deadly and it would be in stark contrast with the very synthetic and fake contests of the show.

In order to make the story, I had to first make what the reality TV show would have been had it not been interrupted and then work those final "fake obstacles" and turn them into real obstacles for the end of the story. At the point where I abandoned the treatment, the remainder of the group (one had been killed, two had been eliminated from the show & I think two separated from the group because they didn't like the leadership) has to sneak into the final obstacle area and find a boat and leave via the boat without alerting another group trying to hunt them down. I wanted the final sequence to be suspenseful but non-violent in keeping with the "Reality TV vs. Reality" aspect of the story. I know that I toyed with the Brad Pitt fake leader redeeming himself because of the potential of a nice sub-plot and character arc but can't remember if I kept it in or not. I really wanted a jarring, un-cinematic reality in order to contrast with what Reality TV portrayed as reality. I know that I didn't put in any romantic sub-plot because, again, I really wanted to sort of "break the rules" and portray reality as very stark and unforgiving and not cinematic and a romantic sub-plot would have appeared very cinematic.

In the end, I can see why this treatment never went past a spirited outline; I became somewhat disillusioned with the Reality TV genre the more that I researched it and the entire genre sort of lost steam by the mid-2000s. It was still popular but not "red hot" popular as it was previously. Others have also done the "fake [media] turns real" at some point. I can remember the movie "Tropic Thunder" eventually doing something vaguely similar and a few other films whose names escape me at the moment. I also think that this would've worked far better as a script than as a story.

One of the things that I remember quite clearly is wanting to start the story with the characters introducing themselves as in an audition and telling about themselves briefly and then replaying that again at the very end while they are on the boat, sailing away, sometimes juxtaposed with their fates or their current selves for a really good contrast in how they turned out. A lot of the before-after would have been very unflattering or, at the very least, unsettling.

As with so many treatments, it wasn't bad but in this case, the contemporary nature sort of doomed it for me, as well as my disinterest in the genre itself & the fact that others have since put their own spin on the concept.

[freebirde]

Steve, I had an idea for a story that wouldn't work well for my short story style. A group of ten people wake up on a freighter that had been stripped for the salvage yard. Each have a bag with fifteen MREs, two liter water bottles, pistol, twenty rounds of ammo, knife, map of the ship with water sources marked, and a paper saying that at the end of five days the people remaining in the contest will split five million dollars. They are fitted with audiovisual headsets and bio monitors. Three ways to be removed from the contest, leave the ship, turn off the bio monitors, or die. The finalist(s) will be transported home or any non extradition country of their choice. Special plot twist for the end. This is one I won't write unless I find someone that writes longer stories that I could coauthor with.

[steve]

Interesting. This has a certain "The Condemned" (2007 movie with Steve Austin) vibe to it. You could work it so that, instead of killing each other (as they did in that movie), they have to work together to survive (a little bit of "The Cube" but not so abstract). They don't initially know the rules; They have to learn the rules from one other (a pinch of "escape room" perhaps?) &, if they don't, they could die.

Sample scene: Early on, two or three of the contestants learn that turning the bio monitors (or just having them malfunction) causes the person to explode. They have to reach all of the other people to tell them to avoid turning off the monitors. There's conflict and tension because they're going through a strange place and they don't have the time to be as cautious as they need to be.

OK, brainstorm. Where's the conflict & where's the hook? How do you differentiate this from something like "Predators" (diverse group of people dropped into a Sci-Fi "Deadliest Game" scenario?).

There have been a lot of contained thrillers and actioners over the years so this is going to be tough to sort of tease out something truly unique about it.

OK, let's start with that this is contemporary and this is science fiction to a degree. There are no "moles" in the group; Everyone is on the up-and-up although, in the story, there could be suspicions and alliances and things like that.

They are clones. They are clones who have to keep going through the same scenario over and over again before they get it right. They keep finding bodies and remnants of prior attempts at solving the puzzle. They can't remember prior attempts because they honestly weren't there but they find corpses of their former clones and they can figure out how those prior attempts failed.

Sample scene: Outside the simulation, they find future copies of themselves waiting to be distributed into the scenario. Some of the copies are still being grown.

Let's go full-length science fiction; The ultimate ending is not getting off of the ship alive because all that does is reset the scenario for whomever is controlling the scenario, the ultimate ending is ending the scenario itself (getting outside of the simulation, if you will). The final shot sets up the sequel: This is only one simulation of many and now they have access to all of them.

OK, so I deviated a little bit from the original idea. If you want to keep close to the original idea, there are certain ways to do that as well. Whomever is organizing this has a lot of resources at their disposal. Snipers are watching the freighter, they can see the glint of binoculars or scopes in the distance. If they can get to the top of the freighter, they can figure out latitude and longitude (grabbing that from "Escape Plan"?). Is the food poisoned?

A point of concern is conflict. Mystery can be conflict but you need to establish very clear rules so that the reader understands when these characters cross a line and face consequences, otherwise, the mystery is diluted.

All in all, it's a perfectly legitimate set-up; It just needs some fleshing out and it can go in a lot of different directions. You should consider working on it more if only to gain research for possible other storylines. Thanks.

Dec 10, 2019 21:41:35 GMT -6 freebirde said:

Steve, I had an idea for a story that wouldn't work well for my short story style. A group of ten people wake up on a freighter that had been stripped for the salvage yard. Each have a bag with fifteen MREs, two liter water bottles, pistol, twenty rounds of ammo, knife, map of the ship with water sources marked, and a paper saying that at the end of five days the people remaining in the contest will split five million dollars. They are fitted with audiovisual headsets and bio monitors. Three ways to be removed from the contest, leave the ship, turn off the bio monitors, or die. The finalist(s) will be transported home or any non extradition country of their choice. Special plot twist for the end. This is one I won't write unless I find someone that writes longer stories that I could coauthor with.

[steve]

Kind of OT from this thread but...

Imagine working on a story outline for a little while about a new Chinese leader who needs to make a big splash because China is in the midst of a recession. He comes up with an audacious plan to take over North Korea by way of an engineered virus that plunges NK into a brief epidemic, allowing China to "rescue" NK by essentially invading them without firing a shot & getting rid of senior NK leadership at the same time. The plan was to plunder NK's untapped mineral resources (supposedly, they are sitting on quite bit) to jumpstart the Chinese economy again. However, the virus unexpectedly mutates & spreads, turning the whole fiasco into a global pandemic that nearly wipes out 25% of the Earth's population.

And then, well, imagine turning on the TV about a week or so ago and seeing a version of that begin to unfold in Wuhan.

*sigh* Not the first outline that I've had to quietly tuck away because life imitates art...