brainstorming – Words Deferred

The 1799 Roanoke Valley Slave Revolt — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

The 1799 Roanoke Valley Slave Revolt

I first heard tell of Abraham when I was helping Miss Elisabeth with the cleaning in the big house. Two of the drivers had come in to get a break from the August heat. They had their lemonade, and then they hung around in the back hall to sneak a few sips of whiskey. If the missus of the house saw that, they’d be the ones getting a whipping.

I heard one of the drivers say that name, Abraham Arnaud. I didn’t know any French back then, but I could tell that name didn’t sound right the way he chewed it up. The other one only spat in response, and then he saw me and I ran on up the stairs with my load of linens before he could find a reason to do something I’d regret. The only Abraham I knew was the one from the Genesis.

Now, having heard that strange name, my ears were all perked up for it. The second time they caught it was when Old Jack was telling stories to the boys. He said Abraham Arnaud was being talked about in whispers all over Virginia and the Carolinas. He heard it from the new boy, Tom.

Word was that the bosses had paid top dollar for Tom, and they were mighty mad when he ran off the first chance he got. Must have hid like a jungle cat, because they never caught him. Usually nobody got away from our straw bosses; they had real sharp eyes and they knew every way to put a hurt on you without making it so you couldn’t work.

Old Jack said that Abraham Arnaud came from Haiti to New Orleans, and he had become a vodou priest. But he wasn’t no regular oungan, lighting black candles and sticking pins in dolls. He had the real power of possession, and he could bring strong lua into his own body or anyone else. To hear Old Jack tell it, Tom was convinced that Abraham Arnaud would tear down every planation house and free every slave. Tom said he had met one of Abraham’s followers, who had taught him a little magic.

That was about when my momma made Old Jack hush up and “stop talking nonsense, putting dangerous ideas in these child heads.” It didn’t matter though, because everyone started whispering about Abraham Arnaud after that.

Four months that went on. Tom never turned up, and when three new slaves came to the plantation, they brought their own stories: runaways all over. Vodou priests walking the roads at night. The Master up at the big house must have heard things too, because more men were set to guard the farm, and the big plantation owners all got their men together to patrol at night, with torches.

The night he came was dark as death, cloudy and a new moon. After midnight the drums started, first far away, then closer, like they were talking to each other. A shout went up, and we heard one gun, then all the drums went quiet. I never heard a quiet like that in all my life. Most of us didn’t dare touch the door of the slave house, but Old Jack opened it a crack and peeked out, and just about fell backward like he’d been hit.

That door swung open and we all saw it, the big house bright as day, sheets of orange flame rising up the walls like a waterfall of light. There were shadows of people running, but one stood perfectly still, outlined in that fierce firelight like the devil, long coat billowing and a straw hat cocked sideways on his head.

“That’s him,” I thought. Nobody else it could be. And that’s how we came to be free, and how I started on the road to real, honest-to-God magic.

The Corporate Cold War Gets Hot — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

The Corporate Cold War

When the history books were written, the story started with an exodus of intellectuals and policymakers from the United States and Britain. Their failure to effectively change the festering kleptocracies of their native lands only galvanized them to fight even harder for the more favorable battleground of the EU.

The opening salvo was the unexpected passage of laws that set hard limits on the size of corporations by employee count, profit, and revenue. Any company too large would have to split up. These limits would tighten over time, and any uncompliant company could do no business within the economic block.

The first front of the war was political, with multinational corporations spending billions to influence elections and run ad campaigns. They threatened to abandon Europe, an empty threat, knowing how much it would cost them. They claimed prices would skyrocket. But they underestimated the public vitriol against them.

When political wrangling failed make the problem go away, a legal arms race began. The corps found a hundred ways to split one company into many while maintaining total control and channeling profits to the same shareholders. Regulators updated the rules, and the corporations changed structure again. It took decades of closing loopholes to see the laws really go into effect.

Some of the corps followed through on their warnings, leaving the EU altogether and eating the loss. Others divested themselves of their European branches. But some of the biggest, loudest corporations gave in and broke up in a sudden cascade of shocking announcements. The continent celebrated.

However, the elite shareholder class had been busy consolidating their power in America, Britain, and parts of Asia. As their influence waned in the EU, elsewhere the lines between corporate and political power blurred and fell away.

This, the history books said, was what led to the worldwide split into two socioeconomic blocs: a new cold war. And if there was one thing the gleeful intellectuals of the EU underestimated, it was the amount of bloodshed the rich would embrace to keep their wealth and power. The rhetoric became increasingly violent, demanding that the “continent of socialists” accept “true capitalism” into their borders, no matter the cost.

Armies rallied along the borders. Fingers hovered over the controls that would launch fleets of missiles and drones. And the doomsday clock ticked forward: five seconds to midnight…

Bad Music — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Bad Music

There was a long-running debate among fans of the band Bad Music. Were they the most punk of the “neo-unda” punk bands, or were they marketing geniuses who truly understood how much people wanted something that was impossible to get?

The name of the band was designed to make it difficult for internet searches. Their shows were never announced more than one day in advance. Everyone entering the venue had to go through tech scanners and put their phones and smart glasses into the block of modular mini-lockers that seemed to travel with the band. They wore masks on stage and never revealed their names. And holy hell did they rock.

They had no label, and they claimed that they didn’t release records. Fans competed to post the highest quality bootleg tracks. There were eternal arguments over which songs were legit, and which were made by copycats and fakers.

At the height of their fame, debates raged over whether “unreleased” songs could win a Grammy while Bad Music topped the charts on every streaming platform. Then the band vanished. No more popup shows. No more cryptic announcements on the “cool” niche music sites.

New songs surfaced here and there, but they were widely regarded as fakes. An expose in The Guardian made tenuous connections, claiming to have tracked two of the anonymous band members to a suicide cult, and two more to a plane crash in Brazil.

The songs remained popular in the ensuing decades. The band’s disappearance only fueled their legend. Conspiracy theories abounded, and many fans were convinced that the band was still alive. Lookalike cover groups became popular, with some even insisting that they were the real deal, back from the dead.

Every year or two, someone claimed the band had reappeared for one last secret show in an unexpected place.

And maybe they did…

The Holy App — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

The Holy App

Caleb Ortiz-Levin made a career through the boom and bust cycles of Silicon Valley. Increasingly desperate bids to sell cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and everything AI. And what did he have to show for it? Only a few billion dollars.

Everyone was shocked when he stepped away from business.

He climbed remote mountains to study at isolated monasteries. He obtained three theological degrees. He brought his cadre of spiritual advisors to every gold plate charity dinner and political fundraiser. He spent six months not speaking. He interviewed the Pope and the Dalai Lama in the New Yorker.

Caleb wasn’t a fool. He knew how he was viewed: just another rich tech bro going down some obsessive rabbit hole. He didn’t mind. It just meant that he would be on the cutting edge of the next big thing: personalized religion.

People were increasingly desperate for meaning in a meaningless world. Why settle for an ethical system written on stone tablets in the bronze age? Why accept a cosmogony developed by shepherds before the invention of telescopes?

The app was downloaded a hundred million times in the first week. It made it easy to register a new religion, set up a hierarchy, and ordain your own priests. All with AI auto-complete, recorded indelibly on the blockchain. People began to wonder how the old religions survived without push notifications and subscription fees.

The two Churches of Satan, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and Hatsune Miku vied for the most adherents in the weekly rankings. The pope denounced it as a tool of the devil. Oddly, this only caused a spike in downloads. Within a year, all the major religions were on the app too.

When Caleb went on the podcast circuit, he was asked one question more than any other: “What do you believe?”

“Who cares?” he said.

Voices of the Dead — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Voices of the Dead

The professors were all thrilled when Dr. Landau agreed to join our little jungle expedition. They didn’t want to reveal their findings in writing, but they had to say enough to catch her interest.

I met her at the landing strip, and she wasted no time. As she stepped out of the plane, she asked me, “What’s all this about the parrots?”

“They’re speaking a dead language,” I told her. It sounded silly when I said it. “But the dig sites are all pristine. No potsherds. No hand axes. No bones or remnants of fire pits.”

She soon gave up questioning me, and we hiked to the camp, hardly speaking. We listened to the banter of long-dead voices, croaked from bird to bird in the treetops.

She was quick to confront my superiors.

“What kind of catastrophe can wipe out all traces of a civilization except their language?” she asked the professors. Of course, they had no answer. We had pondered it for twenty sleepless nights.

I once held those withered, bookish men in high esteem, but they were afraid to tell her our final secret. And who am I to judge them? I didn’t tell her either. She had to find out herself, alone in her tent as twilight fell on the misty jungle.

At night, the parrots stop echoing the words of the dead. After the sun goes down, the birds only recount their final, terrified screams.

Final Exam — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Final Exam

In old movies, recognizing aliens was easy. They looked like giant insects, or gray-skinned people with huge black eyes, or heck, just humans with pointy ears. They spoke words through something mouth-shaped, and if they didn’t want to eat you or lay some eggs in your stomach, they at least wanted something reasonable, like taking over your planet.

The scientists in the old movies didn’t have to worry about Species 104, the plasma clouds that only understand calculus. They never had to devise a translator for Species 92, the fungal/viral symbiosis that communicates by rupturing your cells.

As a trained xenologist, it’ll be my job to explore the galaxy and make first contact with new alien species. I’ll be ambassador of the human race. But first, I need to pass my final exam: picking which one of these ten asteroid chunks is actually alive, and whether it talks by exchanging argon crystals or by carving glyphs into you with a focused sonic pulse.

Based on the noises made by the last student and the amount of blood on the floor of the examination room, I’m guessing it’s the glyphs.

Now, which rock…

Five-Finger Brainstorming for Fiction

I have a day job in software development where I’ve worked with large corporations. Thanks to that job, I’ve had plenty of exposure to corporate efficiency buzzwords and processes, from lean six sigma black belts to leveraging synergies.

While the eye-rolls induced by these terms are often justified, they usually start with a useful kernel of truth before metastasizing into something a VP drones on about in the all-hands meeting as everyone tries not to cringe.

This brainstorming method is based on the five whys, a corporate-speak process for digging a few levels deep to find the real root of a problem. I like it for brainstorming fiction ideas is because it is fast and easy and generates some unexpected connections.

Five Finger Brainstorming

Start with the first premise that pops into your head. It can be almost anything. It doesn’t have to be particularly interesting or story-worthy. However, don’t be afraid to start with something big like a hostage negotiation or first contact with aliens.

Example:

A man kills his neighbor…

Next, ask yourself why that first event happened, or what it implies. Repeat this until you’re at least five levels deep. You can count them off on the fingers of one hand.

Don’t think hard. Just write down the first thing that pops into your head each time. This technique works best if you let your subconscious take the wheel.

A man kills his neighbor…

because the neighbor knows his secret…

his secret is that he is hiding an alien in his basement…

because he is in love with it…

because he is an alien too.

Next, look at this sentence or paragraph as though a breathless child had just run up and told you this story. What questions would you have? I usually have a couple. These questions are natural jumping-off points for expanding the idea further.

Are they the same species of alien?

Why does one need to be hidden? Does one pass for human while the other doesn’t?

What happens after the murder?

Bonus: Story Trees

You can expand on this with a different style of brainstorming—one that is slower and more methodical. Try it with an idea that feels like it has potential, where you weren’t satisfied with your initial blurbs.

Look at each answer as a branching point in a tree. The original idea is the root. Instead of expanding that idea once, expand it in five different ways. Then go down the chain for each of those branches.

(Why yes, my MSPaint skills are incredible. Thanks for noticing.)

Be aware that filling out all the branches results in exponential blurbs. If you don’t want to go that far, just fill in a few branches that pique your interest. Remember, inspiration often strikes when you’re straining to come up with one or two more ideas. On the other hand, you’re under no obligation to stop at five if you want to keep going.

Two Techniques that Work Great Together

The five-finger technique helps dig deeper into the reasons and consequences of an initial idea or event. The story tree forces exploration of alternatives, which can sometimes get you past easy, tropey explanations and into more interesting territory.

In brainstorming, quantity leads to quality. With these techniques you can generate a lot of ideas quickly, so don’t be precious about them. They’re meant to be quick and disposable. So start counting, and come up with something new!

Life in a Signal — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Life in a Signal

It starts—we think—as a garbled message. It continues due to a bug in the protocol that lets a signal repeat forever, bouncing from node to node. It thrives when it mutates to set the multicast flag. Its clone-children spread across the network.

Whatever purpose the original packets had, it’s soon forgotten. This new electronic life, this heart that beats in milliseconds over insulated copper and fiber optic cable, seeks only what all life seeks: to continue itself. Like a shark, it has to keep moving, swimming through wires, or it will die.

Mutant messages broadcast from every node to every node. Bandwidth is used and exceeded. Everything slows to a crawl…

…and…

…stops.

New life born and ended in a few blinks of the eye.

Sadly, we will never know its thoughts or motives, its dreams or fears. All we know is that it caused yet another power outage in Texas.

Dreaming of Other Worlds — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Dreaming of Other Worlds

His dreams are always out of focus. Bits and pieces of familiar places he has never seen. These places speak to him indirectly, in subtle metaphors. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot identify them.

It’s like trying to remember the title of a movie from a song on the soundtrack, or identifying a woman by her perfume. He tries to explain it to his parents, his husband, his children. They don’t understand.

It’s such a relief then, on his deathbed, when his dreams come clear. He remembers all those other worlds—places where he’s lived other lives—and it doesn’t scare him to know that he’s about to go someplace new.

The Story Idea Vault — Super Swap

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes. Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Super Swap

Everyone was leery of the machine at first. Superheroes and supervillains already cause an awful lot of trouble. Why would we want a machine that transfers powers from one person to another?

Sure, heroes want to retire. Isn’t it better that they pass on their powers? Otherwise they’re destined to die in battle as they age, or simply fade into obscurity, hiding in their secret bases or behind their secret identities.

We all wondered if the machine would be used on heroes against their will. Or would the rich and famous simply buy their way into heroic powers? Does anyone really want Jeff Bezos with supersonic speed, or Elon Musk with laser eyes?

Surprisingly, nobody expected the Debt Villains: the people with good intentions taking out huge loans to get their super-powers. How do you expect the super-powered to pay off their debts? It’s awfully tempting to just rob a few banks or jewelry stores. It’s not villainy really. Just a few more heists before they can fully dedicate themselves to proper heroism. Just a few more…