A lot of people worldbuild when they daydream and have the bones of a story kicking around in their brain, but have to pay the bills and raise the kids etc so they never flesh it out and write it down. What’s your story’s premise? Fantasy, sci-fi, alternate history, mystery, western, whatever genre.
Rough outline, a woman loses her husband to violence and takes their young son to a more rural community to get away from the urban environment which has too many ghosts and memories.
Partial inspiration:
She settles into the small town, in an old house that needs work, but she needs the work to put her mind on other things. Lots of quirky locals offer advice, want all up in her business, and she’s polite but shuts them down.
Working on the house, a large, ropy, brown tail dangles from a tree branch outside the window and she’s startled to see a full grown-ass cougar just hanging out. Apparently it liked the place when it was abandoned and sees no need to move on.
She doesn’t know what to do, and throws a home made cheese ball at it, a welcome gift from one of the quirky locals. She didn’t really want the thing, or know what to do with it. The cat bats it out of the air and carries it off.
So now, she didn’t really want to talk to the locals, but has to. She wants to build a fence to keep the cat out.
She has part of it in place, and the cat leaps over it without any trouble at all. The fence wasn’t complete, it could have gone around the fence, it jumped it because it could.
Then, the town erupts. A big cat has been killing livestock at nearby farms, everyone is up in arms and they blame her for moving into the old abandoned house and “stirring up trouble.”
Locals go on a literal torch weilding mob rampage to kill the cat causing all the damage, and they kill one, so everyone thinks the problem is resolved.
But the color on this one isn’t quite… right, is it? And it’s bigger, a male, she’s certain the one by her house was female.
She gets home, pretty much revolted by the mob action, and finds an impossibly small cougar cub, asleep on her porch.
That’s an incredible outline! Got a working title? Maybe “Out of the Bag” or something?
I like the idea that you start with “quirky” locals who are presumably likeable and the main character is probably a bit off putting at first but then later the mob mentality comes out and your sympathies are reversed.
“Ghost Cat”. It’s another name for mountain lion.
Reminds me of this haunting/terrifying song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OELFgreDw5M&pp=ygUgUGluZSBoaWxsIGhhaW50cyBvbGQgd2hpdGUgdGhhbmc%3D
You told it well here, I enjoyed this story.
You might really enjoy the short story ‘26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’ by Kij Johnson.
A doppelganger of sorts replaces a character, but it’s entirely for the better. Despite being an unearthly monstrosity, it’s well meaning, good intentioned and has everyone’s best in mind. Unfortunately this isn’t seen as a good thing by the crowd the original ran with, and those who find out are at a crux between liking the person and fearing the monster.
This is a Star trek Voyager episode. Can’t remember which one.
There’s a similar episode in the twilight zone that could be interpreted as this too, but I’d like to play with it a bit. As an otherworldly entity it doesn’t play by human rules, imagine a gang thinking their just bumping off some cleaned up junky that’s gone straight and all of a sudden they’re being stalked through a mirror realm by a nightmare abomination who periodically dips out to take it’s estranged kids to therapy and volunteer at the community garden.
Sci fi set in contemporary times on Earth. A spaceship from another dimension accidentally enters a freak wormhole and gets dumped off in our universe. Only a single human survived on the ship, augmented by some super fancy AI (that actually works reliably unlike what we have access to nowadays). Captain isn’t able to maintain orbit but is able to land out in the middle of the south Pacific. Captain & AI have no way to return to their home universe or even send a message.
Ship contains a lot of advanced technology. Captain knows the theory of it all but doesn’t know the details. Ship’s AI has schematics for everything on board but not for everything in the civilization they left - only the most commonly used parts.
Ship contains a perfectly efficient recycler and replicator, but it’s limited by speed and by internal volume of the replicator.
Ship has a medbay capable of treating any known disease or injury, but there are only four pods (normal crew size only needs four), and treating something severe like a heart attack or cancer requires a full week non-stop.
Ship isn’t designed for combat or passenger service, but is instead a giant mining ship equipped with tractor beams to facilitate harvesting ore in space. It’s about the size of a giant ore carrier from Earth, and does have some rudimentary point defense weapons to defend against space pirates.
Ship has some problems that make it temporarily not-spaceworthy, and may or may not be able to find all the raw materials it needs to repair itself for more spaceflight. It is however perfectly capable of atmospheric flight operations.
How does the captain interact with us? Is the ship able to find enough stuff to repair itself? Does the captain decide to trade favors for supplies that can’t be synthesized? Or does the captain spiral into a pit of despair at being irrevocably separated from their home?
In case you’re wondering, yes I do as a matter of fact enjoy tech uplift stories.
Does the captain decide to trade favors for supplies that can’t be synthesized?
…how sexy is this captain?
Pssh, how sexy is the ship?
A sci-fi drama about a guy who develops a brain tumor. The tumor becomes sentient and can communicate with the man through their shared thoughts. Over time, they develop a kind of friendship. At the end, the man must undergo brain surgery to remove the tumor. Despite being able to prevent the surgery somehow (haven’t worked this part out yet), the tumor allows it to happen anyway, knowing that it must die in order for the man to live.
I think I would write this as a short story, but I’ve never written any fiction before and don’t even know how to start.
I’ve read a lot of books and articles about how to write, and honestly it just seems like different authors all have different routines. Some are very rigid with their schedules and some write when inspiration takes them.
Everyone needs to know fundamentals of plot, character, and dialogue though. There are college classes on it n
I once read a Harry Potter fanfic where his scar was basically that.
Had a dream about a hermit that finds some strange idol while he’s out hunting. Begins praying to the thing and kind of inventing his religion and morals as time goes on. Eventually he dies, when he gets to the after life it’s like a busy train station. Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. all go to different afterlife’s that are made in the image of their religion. This man’s religion was ancient and forgotten. So ancient and and forgotten that he had no “train” to take him to his afterlife.
Not entirely sure where I’d go with that but I really enjoyed the dream and if I knew how to write I would lol. If anyone wants to write it though feel free and just let me read it when it’s done
Homeless dude living in the train station of the afterlife? That sounds pretty cool. Like the train stations in the Matrix.
There’s something good here - if anyone takes this up leave a link or something for us other folks to check out, too.
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about fleshing this out: who/what made the train station? Given it’s a place people stay only for a short amount of time before being whisked off to their afterlife, what does the MC learn staying there for so much longer?
Urban fantasy/sci-fantasy, just ripping off (part of) my WoD campaign. The story of a witch surviving in a world that goes out of its way to stomp out everything that makes life worth living.
I have three things I want to see in a fictional world (either mine or someone else’s):
- Furries, but not in a weird “metaphor for racism” way.
- A nice sophisticated magic system.
- Either a mideaval fantasy or spacefaring sci-fi setting.
The current idea rattling in my head is for a game which will likely never get finished. A spaceship with a small crew gets blown off close while travelling at warp speed or whatever. The heroes need to visit a bunch of planets (and learn secrets within) to find… Elemental crystals or something, I guess, to make their way home. Not sure how I can incorporate magic into it though, or if that would just be scope creep.
I once started writing a story with a “monster universe” setting but in space. Werewolves and vampires always at war with each other. Humans and animal-humanoids caught in the middle. A few eldritch horrors lurking around the void.
I did a self contained short story set in that universe, about an observation station sitting at the edge of the galaxy, monitoring for potential intergalactic information. They detect a large mass of dark matter that only became detectable when it got close enough to reflect light from our galaxy. As they observed, they realized that the string of dark matter was just a tentacle the size of a large star cluster, and they couldn’t see what was on the other end. It swept close and then retracted away.
I’d finish one of the stories I’d already started:
- Sci-Fi, life on board a converted old interplanetary transport vessel, refitted for interstellar transport, on its way to join a small group of pioneers and colonize a distant planet.
- Fantasy, centered around a crafty dwarf who has built a decent self sufficient for himself independent of the fortress, unaware that his childhood friend caught a curse and caused the fortress to succumb to the goblin invasion.
- A more down to earth story about a struggling early twentysomething, and what sheer desperation does to a person.
…but the common denominator for all three is that I haven’t quite figured out the plot yet.
What is your dwarf society like?
Was*
Typical dwarvish. Very hierarchical. An industrious proud people, full of skilled craftsmen who pull their weight for the greater good of society. Due to seasonal attacks from a goblin horde nearby, they’ve built fortification that protect them, and during attacks the wall guards are helped by alchemists fire. Unfortunately that last step failed during the most recent attack, which was also unusual in its strength and strategy (the horde got outside help), causing the fortress to fall. While looting, the invaders opened the floodgates that had redirected the river, thus drowning any survivors except one.
Shit. No other dwarven cities? No war of reprisal a la War of Dwarves and Orcs?
I played a fantasy game (on Nintendo 64!) that had a lore waaaay too ridiculously deep for itself, but part of it was that a vaguely dwarvish race had dwindled to a single city via repeated wars and pogroms from other races, and were living under the protection of one of the large human kingdoms at the time. These dwarves were also secretly harboring the last known dragon in the world, who had given magic to humans about a thousand years ago.
There are, but they’re quite some distance away, and the story doesn’t focus on the region as a whole.
Over the next 100 years or so VR and haptic tech make it so people can become fully emersed in virtual reality. So pretty much everyone does. There are arguments on both sides, but eventually most people choose to live in their own world as a “god” with only VR interaction between one another. Everyone in VR stops having real kids, but thanks to AI improvements they can still have “kids”. Technology eventually allows people to plug in permanently while their bodies are maintained by AI and robots systems. Eventually their bodies die, but their consciousness has been captured enough by the system that no one knows or notices when their VR friends bodies die in reality.
In the real world a very small segment of society refuses to join the VR universe and pledge to remain in the real world. Maybe there’s some war in there because of this. Eventually though, the population of earth drops to maybe a few hundred thousand mostly wandering communal groups, while everyone else’s consciousness is in VR systems. This is good for the planet.
After a few thousand years, the people in reality have multiplied and built a better more equitable world, but have completely forgotten about the people in VR, and the automated buildings containing the computers have become buried and lost to time. Until one day someone stumbles across one of these ruins and begins interacting with the VR people again despite a mythical belief system that such technology is all bad.
Some shit happens and there’s a VR vs reality reckoning… Maybe some sort of Romeo and Juliet love story to keep it interesting.
That’s the hard part. If I had that, I’d be writing.
If you give me a genre, I’ll give you a premise
I have a setting and characters but no story. And I have stuff that could be part of a story, but I don’t know how to put it together. Like an arranged marriage, and jealousy between someone born to power and someone who fought to earn it. I just don’t know how to make a story that fits all of them in there.
A reverse Three little pigs. Where the pigs (cops) are the bad guys, and the wolf is just a pot head
Mankind has started colonizing the solar system, including installing a satellite at the Sun-Mars L1 Lagrange Point to protect Mars from solar radiation and dumping a ton of water and methane ice on Mars until it is able sustain a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on the surface. Then, Kessler syndrome hits Earth Orbit, which causes a chain of events that collapses society on Earth.
Thousands of years later, it is found that there are now landing paths to get back to Earth, even though these paths are sporadic. A Lunar nation invites a Martian nation to team up to explore Earth and what is left of humanity.
I’ve been wanting to even just story board/sketch is the idea of a character with the ability to affect momentum like charging up a ball bearing bouncing it between his hands till it’s like a rail gun or stopping bullets but I think the ultimate thing he could do would be to remove ALL momentum(“momentum zero”) and have the earth, the galaxy and everything(thousands of meters per second I think) leave something behind or smash it into a wall or the ground, but for a power that strong I think he should have an enate sense of how things are moving to avoid blowing a massive hole in a building with a rock
Also a bunch of loosely connected ideas that I just want make into more of an encyclopedia because I hate charterer growth
First part has Sanderson Cosmere ability energy.
I’d love to write a really good acid western. So far all I have are daydreams about being a badass old west drifter to the music of Spindrift.
Edit: I suppose there’s also what I started when I tried (and failed) NaNoWriMo, which was a horror story about a pathogen that made people deranged killers of a spectacular nature. There was a fight in a stained glass factory, that was kinda cool. Should see if the laptop with the draft still boots…
(If I recall the movie correctly, it was basically The Crazies, but more violent and written before the 2010 version came out [never saw the 1973 version])
