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Our plots in their most basic form

So my current WIP was based on a feeling I got one day as I was driving from where I lived in Fredericksburg, VA to where my grandparents lived in Charlottesville, VA. You usually get there by taking 20 up, but I decided to take a longer route and drive up 3 until I hit 29.

... It was a much longer drive. It was also a more secluded drive--I was driving at night and there were these long stretches of road where all you saw to the left and right were trees. Occasionally a break, and you'd see a single house out in a field, and then just trees again. And all of a sudden I wondered what would happen if I just pulled over to the side of the road and walk through the trees and see what was on the other side of them. It was a weird, eerie feeling, and in the back of my mind I thought that would be a neat story to tell. It took me about 20 years to get around to it.
 

yachtcaptcolby

Minstrel
Shotgun started off with the simple idea of recreating Men in Black with fantasy creatures instead of aliens.

My latest WIP is about a man who steals Death's girlfriend and tries to save himself by hooking Death up with someone new.
 

danr62

Sage
I was brainstorming for book ideas with my wife and she said "You should have an Egyptian princess".

She said she liked Egyptian themes, then changed her mind and said she likes Persian themes better. So now I'm working on a novel in a Persian-like world and with some light steampunk thrown in, along with other fantasy elements.
 
right now working on a project that is an unholy merger of three previous ideas that I couldn't get out my head when I was ill and now seems to be a good idea...

the main plot for my thing focuses at first around actions to bring down a large, anti-technological terrorist orginization. From there it branches when the reasons for their actions where explained and a new threat rises.
 
Once it was public knowledge, EVERYONE would want them for something... villains wanting them to use that power for evil... doctors and scientists wanting to study it... and zealots trying to kill them.

Exactly. My NIP diverged from that idea a bit (more than one person develops the power), but I do have an outline for a story set in the modern day about a guy who develops super-strength and invulnerability, and how he ends up trying to use his powers for good. (He is literally the only person in the world with a superpower.)
 

Shockley

Maester
Now that I'm actually writing fantasy again:

A boy (possibly more, who knows) wants to escape the slum he was born in.
 

Dan

Scribe
My ideas typically start in a very visual form; I'll envision a specific scene, or a character and then I'll rapidly build out from there.

Sadly this usually happens (99% of the time) just before I am about to enter a deep sleep, so I forget most of ideas come the morning.

I've managed to resurrect a few ideas, but not in their entire form.

Two ideas that I am working on at the moment, well planning / writing: a) Bound in Blood, and b) Iron Tale.

A) Started off as planned history of a world prior to a 'planned' novel. Turned into the start of a novel.

B) Started off with a single character, alone in a waste land (Iron Landscape). Finds a robot, fixes him. Become friends. Accidentally kill someone, then the guy loses it and starts killing more people, until it gets to a point where the two are hunted down. Needs more work....

And in visual form, animation / live-film: S-44 Infinitum.

S-44 started as an idea for an easy-to-make film which involved two actors, and one location. Nothing else.

It's essentially about a deep-space craft which has had a catastrophic failure and the two crew members have fifteen-minutes to live. So the film will be fifteen minutes long, and it consist entirely of a dialogue between the two men; they will discuss life, their beliefs, what they think the overall big picture is, what happens when people die, where do they go? Do they go anywhere? And so on, until at the end the oxygen finally runs out, and the film ends with a slow pull back from the two men, out of crafts small window and out into deep space past planets, stars, and so on.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but just before sleep the brain, or at least mine does, becomes incredibly fast at generating ideas, characters, plots, and figuring out details. I wish my brain were like that all the time. :eek:
 

FireBird

Troubadour
I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but just before sleep the brain, or at least mine does, becomes incredibly fast at generating ideas, characters, plots, and figuring out details. I wish my brain were like that all the time. :eek:

I tend to do this too. It's sort of funny because instead of sleeping I'll just think and think, and before I know it I have to get up in a few hours to go to work. :(

I think my plot boiled down to the most basic level is two countries who are both on the verge of civil war are going to war with each other. It's quite fun to write actually.
 

Jabrosky

Banned
My ideas typically start in a very visual form; I'll envision a specific scene, or a character and then I'll rapidly build out from there.
Funny, this is usually the case for me too, although not often before a deep sleep.
 

shangrila

Inkling
The story I'm working on started with a what if; what if a Spartan returned from a battle without his shield?

For anyone wondering, the Spartans used to say "come back with your shield or on it". Basically, the shields were so heavy that you couldn't outrun an enemy while holding it. So, you either came back victorious or dead.
 
The most basic idea for my story came when I was playing Medieval Total War ten years ago, and I suddenly had a vision of an assassin on a rooftop about to take out an enemy diplomat. I then wrote the first page and created the characters.

Since then, the sidekick has become the hero, the hero has shed all of the wet-blanket qualities I thought he needed to be the hero and become a harder, cooler figure, and the political intrigue plot has been pushed back to the sequels. About the only thing that hasn't changed that much is the Empire as a setting.
 
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