50 Story Ideas to get You Juices Flowing

Today I start the month long writing sprint that is Camp Nano Wrimo. I'm pretty excited. I started Nano a few years back when my kids were little and I had far less time to write and I was amazed at how well my family adjusted to the idea. I had two little cheerleaders watching the stat graph over my shoulder every day making sure I hit the goal line. And if I didn't there were more than a few times that my oldest son pushed me back into my seat and told me to keep writing. I couldn't just let myself lose! His competitive streak helped me make my goal and feel for at least one brief month out of my year, that I could be a writer.

The hardest thing in the last several years has been just finding the time to write in between diaper changes and playgroups. And Nano has been my one month out of the year when I go to say, you know what kids? I've given you 11 months out of the year. It's your to give me back just one.

This year for the very first time my kids are old enough to allow me two. So this year April, November and maybe July, I intend to write my heart out and get the words down.

My goal this year is short stories. I don't feel like I have the time to novel but I can get out short stories. The ultimate aim is to start having at least 1 story a month sent out for publication and 1 story each quarter sent to Writers of the Future. Which kind of freaks me out in a very grown up it's-finally-time-to-start-writing-for-real sort of a way.

So in honor of short stories, I thought I'd post a few of the story ideas I've collected over the past couple of months. They aren't complete. Mostly they're little story clips meant to be rearranged and smooshed together in a thousand different ways. And they're fun!

But most of all, I'm finding them to be terribly useful.

50 Story Ideas to get You Juices Flowing
A homemade medicine.
The ruins of a temple
A villain who truly loves someone
A hero who breaks
Statue of a God with a scratched out face
The last animal freed from the zoo
A coward who acts bravely
A long sealed library
A tunnel made of light
Chasing seals off a dock

A fall from a window
Dragged by a carousel
Kites like birds swarming
A hot air balloon ride
A locked master bedroom
A phone call disconnected
A homeless man's photograph
Radio that receives only a single station
A car door that lacks a handle
A museum guard who touches the paintings

What does 'fisher's of men' really mean?
Divorce as a literal disease
Talking skeleton
A pet bat
A broken CD
The most important knitted cap in the world
Children sold by their mother
Standing corpses lining a crypt wall
A literal map of the heart
a bridge made out of fabric

Obsessive planner has his plans taken away
Overwhelming tactile sensations
A man with a room covered every inch in stuffed fish
No one is allowed to acknowledge the difference between the sexes anymore
A seamstress needs to sew human flesh
Watching on the day the world's last oil reserve is lit on fire
A character with a lisp who can't stop talking when nervous
16 shipwrecked ships are swept up onto shore on the same day
A woman sews herself into her own burial shroud
A scribe paid to sit on the steps of the courthouse to write letters for the illiterate masses

A baby abandoned because of a harelip
A vampire that sucks your blood through your shadow
A shadow that has turned deadly
A woman marries a convict at midnight through the bars of his cell
Don't step on the cracks
A breath on the back of your neck that changes everything
Seizure dogs
Someone making homemade chloroform
Printed DNA contaminates a crime scene
Why can't you walk by a pond without throwing in a stone?


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