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

[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.