Quickies

[rowyn]

I've been trying to think of story ideas that take place over a short period of time. Like, a day or less. Part of my motivation in this is that almost all my fiction, whether it's an RPG or a book, runs really long. And I'm thinking that if the time period covered by the story is short enough, then there'd be a limit to how long even I could drag it out. "Game of October" demonstrated that one month is still too long. Maybe 12 hours would work?

This dovetails with my post a few weeks ago looking for non-violent books, since another common fixture in my writing is violence-based conflict. Also, conflict on a huge scale. The fate of the world hangs in the balance! I want to scale down, to write about something important but not earthshaking, interesting but not epic.

So far, I don't have many ideas.

The most obvious one is a literal race: characters competing to reach a physical goal. It doesn't have to be as simple as a horse race or a car race: "Rat Race" showcased one way of injecting variety into the "race" premise.

Other kinds of sporting events have a similar time-limited nature. I don't really like sports, and most don't translate well to written form, but possibly a fictitious (fantasy or futuristic) sport could sustain a story.

Another possibility is a "race for treatment" -- one real-world example of this would be getting a snake-bite victim from the jungle to a hospital. Still, I'm wanting to steer away from life-or-death scenarios. A fantasy example might be "get the faerie back to the portal before it closes at dawn or she'll be stuck here on Earth for ten years" -- where failure is bad, but not fatal.

Then there's "you have to stop X event from happening at Y time". Classic ones are "stop the meteor from hitting the Earth" or "stop the bomb from going off", but less dire possibilities exist. For example: Lily is marrying Damon tomorrow, but Lily's ex-boyfriend suspects Damon's lying to her. Can he get proof that Damon's really a sleazeball before it's too late? In a similar vein would be political scenarios: "this treaty will/won't be signed unless the protagonists are able to provide certain information by X time."

Anyway, not sure I have anything I really like yet. Anyone have ideas they'd like to share?

Comments

an idea? (beginning of one that is?)

[seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com]

In a slalom as i understand the skier who bypasses
or knocks down a gate loses...
could there be a race designed to reward an ability
to travel in time avoiding some sort of check point?

or in space requiring teleportation...

the first one who arrives at tomorrow morning 8am without
making all of the marked intervals wins.

does this make sense?
not much but I wonder if there could be something here...

in fact small jumps in time could be imagined to be
easier than large ones on the principle that small
atomic particles seem to have a freedom in time that
larger ones do not
that is at best pseudo science of course...
umm best I can do. +S

Re: an idea? (beginning of one that is?)

[rowyn]

Ooo, that's quite a nifty premise. I'll have to think about that some more. Thanks! :)

[kagetsume.livejournal.com]

Anything can be dragged out, I'm afraid. How long was the 'Just Trust Me' timeframe? Pretty sure it was only a couple of days. How many months did it run as a plot...? :-)

-- Kagetsume

[rowyn]

JTM covered less than 24 hours and ran for eight or nine months, IIRC.

Nowadays, I'm willing to think of eight or nine months as "short". O_O

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Find the WMD stockpile in 12 hours, before the dictator ejects you from the country and is certified as not having WMDs?

Time dilation? It's turnover, and the engines aren't working. You have 12 subjective hours to fix the engines before you miss your deceleration window and can no longer stop at your destination with the fuel you're carrying.

Everyone in the country is obviously under a massive 'charm person' spell. The PCs happened to be protected against charm for some other reason, but the potion'll wear off in 12 hours. Can they figure out what's going on before they fall under the same spell as everyone else?

+TB+... except that the butterfly lifespan *is* 12 hours, like Seraph worried? >:)

[rowyn]

Whee, neat ideas! The WMD one amuses me particularly, I don't know why. >:)

+TB+... except that the butterfly lifespan *is* 12 hours, like Seraph worried? >:)

I've thought about that before, in fact. But it's too depressing for me to enjoy doing, I think.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Siege

A research station's experimental device has attracted the attention of a nigh invulnerable but normally placid space amoeba, or equally curious but unknowable aliens. It will take 12 hours for reinforcements to arrive and drive off the intruders, but in the meantime the research staff must hold the station together and keep curious tendrils out of the labs or months of research will be lost.

[rowyn]

I love that one! That'd make a great RPG. <3

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

IMO a good short story covers one plot point well; a good novel goes through many plot points. Where you wind up stretching stuff out is because you're trying to come up with 'a worthy plot', and that's naturally going to have multiple plot points - twists and turns galore.

What comes to mind for me as far as short story ideas go is a test - prove that someone has a unique quality, to be able to work magic or to do so in a reasonably sane and trainable fashion. That's it - short, there's only one problem to be worked out, "Pass the test" and the scope of the test is fairly limited.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Hey, have you shared your ideas for the "avatar" setting with Rowyn? One thing that occurred to me was that an interesting way to flesh out an RPG setting might be to write a bunch of short story snippets - incomplete stories, from different perspectives of different people, but together they might help to form a picture of an event (or some aspect of the setting).

[rowyn]

Yep, he posted about the avatar idea on LJ. I made a few comments on it, even. :)

The "writing snippets" reminds me of the fluff pieces that show up in the sidebars of RPG books. One of my friends had commented on liking those better than the actual rules, usually. Lut likes WH 40K fluff we'll enough to read the novels about the setting. :) They are a good way to develop the world in a more organic fashion.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Well, that was pretty much the worthwhile thing about the Mutant Chronicles RPG, really: the little story snippets in the sidebars were what sold it for me. (Well, that and a lot of the art was of better quality than what was average for the time.)

tuftears expanded a bit more on ideas he had for a particular character for the setting, via email, and this in turn helped to flesh out the setting a bit more in my mind. (It's not enough to know just about the world, but also who lives in it.)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I'll send you some more snippets then. };)

[rowyn]

I think the reason I stretch things out is that I'm uncertain about "skipping" to the next plot point, or just how to get to it. So instead of zapping ahead, I feel my way forward by thinking "what do the characters do *next*?" And then I write it out, but it has to be *interesting* somehow, so I need to present some important angle or new information in it. And then whatever I add has to matter later so that there was a point in presenting it at all, so I need a follow-up scene eventually, and ....

*sigh*

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I know the feeling. =/

This reminds me a bit of The Princess Bride, where the writer introduced the conceit that this book really consisted of just the "highlights" of a much larger and more epic older book. No, really, there is a lot of interesting stuff that happens on this journey! Honest! But we're just skipping forward to where the main story gets rolling again....

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Hmm, do you outline your stories? Or is it more, you have a premise, then you have the characters work their way out from there?

I dunno, it sounds like you already have the answer then - just be willing to skip forward, if you want to keep it short. };) Of course I haven't written any novels myself...

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

It's a really good harvest in Elftown on Fantaworld. The Vintnelves should be working eighteen hours a day to get the wine all pressed -- it is far too good a harvest to waste. That includes the migrant dwork (dwarf/ork) workers. But that's a lot more than the fifteen-hour days of a regular harvest, so everyone's on the edge of exhaustion. Which makes it a really bad time for Elfyteen to announce that she's pregnant with help from generally-despised hired hand Dwombar.

For one sort of category of examples. Plenty of worldbuilding available there, if you don't want to use generic fantasy stock like I did. Two minor crises that stack to make a story-sized one. Neither of them that big, and they don't even need to be bad: the harvest is actually good, it just has to be done now.

[rowyn]

Thanks! That's a neat approach. I like the idea of a "good crisis" -- sort of what I was after with the "race" premise, where the protagonist gets something good for winning and losing just leaves him where he started. But a natural opportunity, like a harvest, is more interesting than an artificial one. The former feels less contrived.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Most of my inspiration (not that it often translates into anything actually happening with it) comes in the form of rebellion against perceived tropes. I see some story and it grabs me somehow, but ... no! It went in the wrong direction!

That "incidental extra" was far more interesting than the annoying protagonist. Why does he get the "flashing neon protagonist sign" over his head, anyway? I want to hop off this train and follow HER story instead!

What? The hero wins just because he grunts a bit and makes some lame mini-speech, and suddenly reveals he had an uber-power he's never bothered to use before? That's cheating! Let him LOSE, and let's see how he deals with the story from that point on.

Oh, you just know this plan isn't going to work, because they've *explained* it to us. Not that there's any good reason for it to - BAH! Why did he suddenly turn STUPID? Why can't the plan work for once? The plot seams are showing!

...

I suppose the impact of writing a story that is an attempt to break or subvert a trope is lessened unless someone is familiar with the trope in question. And depending on how I do it, I could be in danger of just writing really bad fan fiction.

...

As for the scale issue ... well, maybe you could take one of your stories that does form in your head and that leans toward the epic, and figure out how it can be "scaled down" by changing the scope. Is the world in danger? How about just one life? And maybe it's not even about physical death, but something more spiritual.

(I am suddenly reminded of Kino's Journey. Great anime series. I highly recommend it. I have the whole series on DVD.)

[rowyn]

I actually did the "scale down" thing once already: my initial ideas for Silver Scales had Kildare's quest as something epic, like saving his country. I scaled it down to just him. And was very happy about that ... until I turned around and made the sequel something world-shaking. >.<

Often, I'll be inspired by wanting to invert a story, too. Prophecy does that twice, by making the big bad world-destroyer effectively a protagonist, and by re-visiting the classic Electra/Orestes story from Electra's perspective.

[narile.livejournal.com]

A Journey to Babel type campaign/adventure. The characters aren't the diplomats, they are the flunkys working in the neutral city/station/planet, who's job it is to make sure that the current meet up goes off without a hitch...or at least with only the hitch that they want. Another version of this has the characters be the valet's/batmen/attendents of the ambassadors, doing the 'real' work as the diplomats posture, kind of a 'Yes Minister' game.