What's an idea you have for a story that you think is really good, but don't have the skill or time to flesh out?
What's an idea you have for a story that you think is really good, but don't have the skill or time to flesh out?
Shoutout to !writingprompts@lemmy.world, hope yall get more writers over there
Life on a planet, either future earth or maybe stranded on another, where only the regions between night and day are habitable. All life needs to constantly move to be in a region of dawn or dusk. Some places near the poles could have semi-permanent civilizations that don't need to move as often.
There's a random planet in Mass Effect that is tidally locked, and mentions it's life exists only in the twilight region. The light side is violently hot, and the dark side is brutally cold. Every time I come across this planet my imagination always goes a little wild, picturing strange alien creatures lumbering about in the cool air beneath a deep purple sky and perpetual sunset. It's such a cool vibe.
I think you'd like The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson! Came out a month or so ago, definitely worth the read. The setting is a planet where the sun/sunlight kills, literally hot enough to melt the rock of the planet as it goes. Very good book imo
Thanks for the recommendation!
I'm imagining so many diverse civilisations... Some living in the poles, with rotating walls and mirrors to control the heat. Some civilisations living underground. Some are nomads, moving constantly (would work really well for small planets with a very long day). Some civilisations live near volcanos and use geothermal heating to survive the long nights, and hibernating in deep caves in the day.
Later when nuclear energy and heatpumps are invented/discovered, more of the planet becomes inhabitable, with extremely fast underground trains to facilitate travel.
This is the most recent world in Thresholder, if you'd like to read an excellent fic that fleshes out that idea well
With all the oversaturation of superhero content I'm surprised I haven't seen anything where all superhero abilities are lost at puberty (and still only rarely seen before that).
I can see a lot of mileage in a setting where some people are castrated to try and retain powers (maybe this works partly and dulls your power), where non superheros are exploiting children and their powers, seems like there's a good amount of potential narrative in there which I'm way too lazy to come up with myself.
What, like how Lyra stops being able to read the alethiometer when she hits puberty?
I've only read northern lights once and didn't continue with the series so I've either forgotten what an alethiometer is or never got to it.
From memory your daemon can be any creature it wants till you hit puberty though, so a bit like that I guess yeah.
It's basically just the reverse of xmen I suppose, just seems like an interesting concept to explore and I'm surprised I've not seen it done (maybe it has, I'm no tv/comic expert).
You know how baby snakes are more dangerous because they don't know how to inject the proper amount of venom?
Child super "heros" would be terrifying.
Alien landing site is discovered by a liberal university student who's barely passing. This adds to their already crippling stress as they try to navigate the world with an alien companion and have to figure out a way to get them off world before the alien becomes a political or scientific captive.
Comedy as we watch everything go wrong to this person pushed way out of their league and past their breaking point.
I don't have a story, but I have a setting that's been really underutilized.
We, as a species, were nomadic for hundreds of thousands of years. We had tens of thousands of years of cohabitation with other hominids, intermingling, making important and powerful discoveries, exploring, etc.
And there's no one using that for a story?
The only stories about that time that I see are about dumb cavemen or ice age migration.
These people had the same mental capacity that we have now. They had culture, rituals, trade, interesting things.
So yeah, a story set in the prehistoric times.
I wrote a lot of star wars fanfic back 20 years ago because I was terrible at writing and couldn't afford college classes for a few semesters. I needed the practice, and the best way at the time for me to exercise that skill was forcing myself into creative writing. Those chapters and the idea of how the story would end were never finished.
In 2020, I started a DnD campaign based off those chapters, and we are still playing the same campaign. When we began, I thought I had maybe two, or maximum three years of content. Now at three years later, we are optimistically at bout 1/3 of the way through the story playing at roughly every other week.
If I had one wish, it would be to have three hours to sell the idea to Jon Favreau, because he would make it the next Star Wars saga. I've taken elements from KOTOR1, The Witcher, The Expanse, and most of the new star wars shows to create a story where my players are battling for what they believe is right, when there are no right answers.
I've been lying to my players for about three years. They believe they are bringing peace and prosperity to a shattered Republic by fighting on the side of the rebels about 1000 BBY. What they do not know is that they've been manipulated and windwashed by a sith lord into decapitating the Jedi order and acting as the admirals and generals of the rebel fleet and army.
I have been planning this for ages. All the names of recurring characters are anagrams for things like "Revan was right", "peace is a lie", and "sith lord doom", and in one part of the story, a player is actually playing his same character without knowing it, and his "new" character's name is an anagram of his original character's name.
There will come a point where he will find out he was manipulated by the story, and the other players will find out I did not tell them the whole truth of their own situation. It is going to be glorious. The party will find out they are all essentially Sith apprentices with no easy way out. And then we will get to the actual subject of the story--what it means to be a Jedi. What do you do, when everything you believed in and believed was right turns out to be a lie?
When faced with losing everything, like Obiwan Kenobi, how do you continue serving the light when it has robbed everything from you?
Goddamn dude. That sounds amazing!
The first Woman president of the USA is elected as tensions with Russia and China hit a boiling point. Behind closed doors the President faces a personal battle: whether or not to come out as Trans.
Plot twist: It's Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Nice try OP! You're not stealing my gold mine of a story idea that easily!
A virus has rendered the population of the earth sterile. No new births. Extinction of the human race is inevitable. How would that play out? Absolute lawlessness? No more wars?
reminds of the children of men movie
That’s because it is Children of Men.
Societies would probably degenerate to absolute chaos. Relevant book exists: The Children of Men
film: Children of Men, 2006 (trigger alert: realistic brutality!)I'd guess a lot more unprotected sex and IVF
Cocaine and hookers is the new religion
This is mainly for my own self-indulgence, but I've long fancied writing an "isekai" story about someone who found himself in a "typical isekai" setting but with a twist.
::: The story. The last paragraph of the spoiler describes the twist ending.
The story starts out with him being in a remote community next to a forested mountain (this would become important later). Our protagonist would make his way into bigger and bigger settlements until he comes across some rather important people who were in fact looking for him. After some other developments, in which he becomes conscious of his "powers," he decides to go to the people looking for him—or rather, their boss, the emperor of a neighboring empire.
However, before he makes his way to the empire's capital, he's abducted by a rebel group. This rebel group gives him a rundown of why the empire is looking for him: that he's the subject of a prophecy which is the very foundation of that empire and its eventual downfall.
It turns out, the empire is acting to fulfill the prophecy that will put the end to their empire, and willingly so. According to the prophecy, our protagonist will put the end to the empire, and all sentient life in the world, through a process of "ascension" (imagine an isekai version of the human instrumentality project, I suppose, but with way less magitek and more hand-waving). This rebel group wants none of that, however, and presents their case to our protagonist.
When asked about it, the rebels reveal that neither the empire nor the rebels know how this "ascension process" will occur, but both have faith that this is fated to occur, and that the protagonist appearing is a sign of that. The protagonist wants some time to think about it, and more importantly, some time to just take in all the events thus far. The rebels understand, and give the protagonist some time.
The empire, however, has discovered that the protagonist is in the rebel base, and had attacked. In order to spare the rebels from being destroyed, the protagonist escaped from the rebels (he's still technically their prisoner), and went along with the empire's troops.
Our protagonist was presented to the emperor, not as a prisoner, but as a guest of honor. Talking to our protagonist in private, the emperor presented the empire's case: they're acting on the prophecy, not because they're bound to it, but because they want to. The emperor also told our protagonist the truth of his existence in this world: he is this world's creator, literally their God. Everything that happens in this world is because he willed it to happen. This is his power all along: whatever he imagined, the world manifests.
Well, this is a shock to our protagonist, who asked for some time to think about the implications of everything he's found out so far. For all his powers as god of this world, however, our protagonist can't will it that he knows why he's the god of this world. This god, our protagonist, has no power over himself in this world.
The rebel group, after having been scattered after their base is dismantled, launched a desperate attempt to secure our protagonist. They were rendered helpless facing the empire's elites, but our protagonist asked the emperor to give them an audience (with the emperor) as well.
In this meeting, the representatives of the empire on one side, headed by the emperor himself; the representatives of the rebels on the other, gave their arguments to our protagonist at first, which devolved to a shouting match between the two sides. Our protagonist started dissociating, and found himself lying inside a tent, in the middle of a forested mountain, in what is presumably the real world.
This real-life version of our protagonist is not feeling very well, however. He can barely open his eyes. He's incredibly tired, and more importantly, suffocating to death.
That's the twist, unfortunately. This "isekai world"is his dying dream. This is why I think this is just my self-indulgence. It's a very formulaic "dark twist" on a cliché.
OP guy (centuries old but looks 25, good looking) lives out near the forest, almost at the edge of civilisation. He has built a small house, farms, and because his powers so incredible (give him the most OP of them all; telekinesis, telepathy, understanding of languages and concepts, unlimited mana and skill to manipulate it etc), he lives in harmony with nature.
One day, he visits the nearby town, and picks up a ragged orphan girl who was being beaten in an alley (don't ask me how, that's up to the writer). This is the story of the OP man seeing his "daughter" cross the stages of life he had forgotten about with age, come of age, go through education etc.
If possible, I'd like some comedy and some romance on the side for OP too. Thanks!
Im trying to get a story running about a man in the year 3000 who finds a usb stick from the dark ages, our times!
He immediately tries to put it into a USB slot. Then turns it over and tries again. Then turns it back over and tries again, successfully this time.
Turns out it's one of those "USB killers" that instantly bricks anything it's plugged into.
The moral of the story: don't plug in random USB sticks
So after watching yet another time travel movie where there's a stupid closed time loop plot -- e.g. someone invents time travel, goes back in time, and gives themselves the idea to invent time travel... a colleague was wondering if there was a practical way to prevent time loops from forming (if we hand-wave away the inherent silliness of traveling back in time). That gave them an idea for a hard-science-fiction story.
The key element is the construction of a device that will produce different outcome if you go back in time and run it again, e.g. via nondeterminism of quantum-scale events like tunneling, entanglement, and so on. You would need to then buy lottery tickets based on the output of the device, then if you win, buy more tickets the same way. If you win the lottery N times in a row, you assume you are in a time loop and devote the resources you have to subvert it (while also continually buying more tickets).
If you can force a new stable state, e.g. by allowing the traveler to form the loop as before, but creating a requirement for your input... or putting it within another loop, you are now a very wealthy and powerful person.
Then you would ask a few friends to log on to a social media platform where you are have some level of anonymity and disseminate the method in a subtle way, for example in a question asking for story ideas. That way the idea is present in other minds and a removal job becomes more difficult, as it's not clear where the idea originated.
If you were fulfilling this request on Lemmy, someone would be able to go to your home instance, and find plans for such a device. It would probably look a lot like a particle detector that you could build at a low cost. They would have published first light on the detector a few weeks from when you read about this story idea.
This is story about you, who will have participated in the history of the future.
Can you find us?
I don't know if I would call it really good, but if I were to ever write a novel the setting would be dark fantasy like somewhere between the middle ages and the modern times where most men of the protagonists society are about to come back from a long war, but they also bring back a mysterious illness.
The protagonists were just too young to have gone to said war, but maybe an older brother did go, maybe he fell idk.
At some point the father comes home, but what was supposed to be a happy occasion turns darker because he is changed by war.There has to be some form of secret society that has something to do with the illness or the lack of a cure for the common people.
And the young protagonists will have to deal with that situation due to circumstances and not because they were chosen or secret princes or something like that.And I am a sucker for happy endings so while the novel would be rather dark as a whole, the ending would see a dramatic change to society with at least the potential to get better.
I think times of change make for good fiction.I will never write that novel though, but just maybe I might get to use the setting for a TTRPG campaign some day.
When I was a kid I had this idea about a protagonist who's a serial killer but kills bad people. I think I even wrote a chapter or so, but it was probably shit. Then later someone wrote Dexter, so I don't need to worry about it any more.
Edit: it was Jeff Lindsay, the first book was in 2004. It was probably the mid-90s when I was having those ideas so we might've been thinking about it at the same time lol
Jesus as a bumbling type of guy.
Raises Lazarus from the dead. He comes back as a zombie.
Walks on water. He's using the floaty balloons you put on kids' arms.
Water to wine. Accidentally lite beer.
I think I had one other one, back when I came up with this idea when I was a lot younger. Or, maybe I said the disciples kept him around for the water-to-wine trick and didn't really like him. Whatever.
Long time ago, I did a version of Don Quixote reimagined as a Star Wars superfan. Riding a white motorcycle with an X-Wing helmet, he travels from his home in Mantua, New Jersey to Atlantic City for a Star Wars convention. Along the way, he meets a manager of a hotel who is a little person and he mistakes for Yoda, camping out by the icemaker to prove he's ready to be given the rank of Jedi Knight, he takes on a Padawan stoner who follows on a moped, and tilts at windmills imagining them to be TIE fighters and AT-STs.
The thing writes itself, but the problem was that Don Quixote is really long and meandering.