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

[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.