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

[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. };)