Posts Tagged ‘Story Premises’

New Story Premises

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Here are those story premises I told you about in the title of this post:

  1. An eccentric billionaire inventor makes jet packs for the consumer market. The problem is, they must be powered by human blood. Lots of it.
  2. Jerry Dolans, a.k.a Agent Jackknife, was the best spy in the biz. His Turret’s affliction was never an issue until one day it directly led to the death of his contact in Geneva. Because of his high standing with the president, Jerry is given clearance to try an experimental (and highly classified) treatment for his disease. Unfortunately the treatment actually worsens his condition. However, there is a happy side effect, as his extra swearing outbursts turns him into the ultimate stand-up comedian. His career takes off quickly, but he soon runs into trouble when he starts doing jokes about his old spy days. With his former employers out to kill him, he enlists the help of a small band of Facebook fans to protect him and help get his story out.
  3. Officials in a small Georgia town pass a law which makes obesity mandatory. The track stars of the local high school organize a major protest in front of town hall. When the mayor dies of an obesity-related heart attack, the track team is charged with murder. With their due process rights being ignored, they are forced to plan an escape from the jail house before what is guaranteed to be a sham of a trial. The townspeople are demanding the death penalty, and the judge is up for re-election.
  4. A celebrity chef must go into hiding after a series of ridiculously unlikely and unrelated coincidences cause the deaths of every single person eating at his restaurant one night. After a few months pass, the restaurant is abandoned and condemned. The chef then moves into the boarded up building and pretends to be a ghost to frighten off curious trespassers. However, it turns out the place really IS haunted- by the ghosts of all the people who died that fateful night. Fortunately, they’re all idiots and can’t see through the chef’s disguise.
  5. A kung-fu instructor has some explaining to do when is beaten up by two 10-yr old boys at a beach.

More Story Premises

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

I am still trying to come up with an idea for a Webcomic. This process has led me to write some more story premises:

  1. A flying saucer crashes in the jungle. All passengers are killed except one little baby alien. A tribe of gorillas adopts the little orphan, raises him and teaches him the ways of the forest. The gorillas grow super intelligent from the crashed ship’s radiation, and the alien becomes like Tarzan.
  2. After arriving home following a particularly brutal loss, an aging prize fighter finds a mysterious package on his doorstep. Inside the package is a pair of old, dirty boxing gloves. Having lost his own gloves due to his ever increasing absent-mindedness, he begins using the strange gift during his training sessions. As time passes, he finds his reflexes improve, as well as all of his cognitive faculties. He correctly assumes the gloves are magic, yet sees no reason to question where they came from or how they became so magic. He is happy with the results, except for one unfortunate side effect: He grows six huge, female breasts. This is a trade-off he’s willing to live with, but will his new sensitive and inconveniently located body parts prove to be a disadvantage in the ring?
  3. When an undercover cop with a severe lemon allergy starts working in a Sprite bottling plant, he uncovers a shocking secret. There is no real lemon flavor in Sprite! This knowledge forces him to make a difficult decision. Should he risk blowing his cover to expose the lie, or does he allow the company to continue deceiving it’s billions of customers? Also, the floor manager of the factory is an evil lizard-man.
  4. A middle-aged married couple decides to spice up their sex life by having a threesome with an Internet stranger. Awkwardness abounds when the person who answers the ad turns out to be the priest from their church who married them. He shows up wearing a ski mask and tries to disguise his voice, but the couple recognizes him immediately. In order to avoid humiliating him, the couple decides to pretend they don’t know him and they all go ahead with threesome. Well, it turns out that the whole thing was a sting operation! The priest secretly recorded everything and plays the tape to the entire congregation at the next mass! Somehow, the church members don’t realize that the masked man is the priest, but they demand severe punishment for the deviant couple. The church mob eventually chases the couple out of town with pitch forks and torches. However, the couple gets revenge by borrowing a monster truck from a neighboring town and drives it right through the church. They run over the priest, but because he’s made of rubber, he’s totally fine. However, being run over by a monster truck was just the wake-up call he needed to see the error of his ways. He apologizes to the couple and explains the whole story to the rest of the church. He then declares that, from hence forth, November 11 with be known as Threesome Day. Every year on this date, all church members are encouraged to drive monster trucks through their living rooms. Ironically, instead of doing that, most church members just have threesomes on that day.
  5. A magician’s beautiful assistant and his rabbit are tired of playing supporting rolls in his act. When they decide to set out on their own, the magician falls into a deep depression. He begins to drink heavily and his work suffers. One morning after a show, he’s found dead in his motel room. Police say it was suicide but the former assistant and the rabbit aren’t convinced. As they attempt to solve the case, they learn strange secrets about their former employer’s past. Like, for instance, he liked to suspend 5lb weights from his balls.
  6. Everyone thinks this one minotaur is a douche because he dresses like a hipster, but he’s actually pretty cool and down to earth. The slightly pudgy, but cute art chick should totally try talking to him. Maybe she could invite him to her opening reception, because he totally likes art. First, though, she must overcome her extreme shyness, and also her fear of bulls. Her father, a matador, was killed during a show, after some jokester secretly replaced his sword with a floppy rubber one.

I guess a few of these are so long that they actually becomes stories, not just premises…There will be more some time soon.

A Few More Story Premises

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

I’m not sure if these are as good as some of the past ones, but I figured I’d post them:

  1. A birdwatcher comes across a purple bear cub in the woods.
  2. Due to strange coincidences, Martha is starting to believe that her daughter’s imaginary friend is actually the ghost of her deceased husband. The only problem is that the imaginary friend happens to be a woman! Desperate for answers, Martha tracks down an old witch doctor that claims he can perform post-corporeal trans-gender operations on spirits who ask for them.
  3. In an attempt to ruin Easter, an atheist candy maker begins making his chocolate bunnies out of real rabbits. When The Pope gets wind of this, he sends his two top Swiss Guard Assassins to stop him. The two skilled professionals are confident they can take out their target, but they foresee a much greater challenge in the mission. Will they be able to share a hotel room without giving in to the uncontrollable lust they feel for each other?
  4. Coach Jenkins discovers that his star basketball player is a former genie. There are no rules against genies playing, but this one happens to be 600 years old and the school charter states that varsity athletes must be under the age of 18. The situation gets even worse when the team captain of the rival school finds the abandoned lamp and plots to put the genie back in it. Jenkins devises an overly complex plan, and sends the rest of his players to deal with the other team. Meanwhile, the coach attempts to charm the beautiful, but humorless school board director so he can convince her to change the age limitation clause. His plan backfires, though, when the director becomes completely obsessed with him. She decides to help the rival captain put the genie back in the lamp, hoping she can make the coach fall in love with her by using one of her three wishes.
  5. A blind man is able to fool the admissions officer of a flight school and begins taking flying lessons. He runs into trouble, however, when they don’t allow his seeing-eye dog on the plane for his first solo flight.
  6. A family of ducks moves into an in-ground swimming pool of a suburban Connecticut home. The human family that lives there thinks the ducks are adorable until one day they look out to see the ducks surrounding the dead body of their next door neighbor.
  7. When a mummy visits a museum, the curator thinks he’s part of an exhibit that is trying to escape. The curator captures the mummy and seals him in a glass case. That night, the mummy witnesses the murder of a night watchman by a masked intruder. He must find a way to get out of his glass prison and solve the crime.
  8. The devil tries to go straight and opens up a sausage shop in a small town. His secret blend of spices wins over the locals right away. However, when a tourist comes down with a case of salmonella and dies, the Feds think Satan is up to his old tricks. They plan a sting operation, and it’s up to the devil’s new loyal customers to clear his name before he gets deported back to hell.

More Story Premises!

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

OK, I am finding that coming up with these stories loosens up the brain and helps me be more creative. It also gives me a rest from painting and drawing which is sometimes necessary to recharge the batteries. So here are 5 premises I came up with today. I hope you find them amusing:

  1. The principal of an underachieving public school offers the reward of a class field trip to Devil’s Tower, Wyoming for the class with the highest average test scores. Believing that the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is based on a true story, one 10th grade biology teacher is desperate to win. She invents a potion that is supposed to make her students more intelligent. The students do grow smarter, but there are some strange side effects. It makes their skin turn green-ish gray, their eyes become large black and lidless, and all of their hair falls out. The teacher now fears that the aliens at Devil’s Tower will feel like they’re being mocked because of her class’s appearance!
  2. When a rich dragon moves to town, the politically correct mayor tries to outlaw the playing of the game Dungeons and Dragons. A group of teens continues to play in secret, but when they are spotted in the woods enacting a medieval battle, their game is mistaken for a plot to kill the dragon. It turns out the mayor is actually trying to set the teens up. He plans to kill the dragon himself, steal the treasure, and frame the teens for it.
  3. A man with a terminal illness decides to take control of his situation by arranging what he considers to be a more noble demise for himself. He takes a trip to the Sunderbans in India with the intention of encountering a hungry tiger in the wilderness. He has always loved this majestic beast and thinks he actually was one in a past life. As irony would have it, just as he is about to confront a large male Bengal, he is attacked by a crocodile! The ravenous tiger does not stand for this, and dives into the pond to fight for his food. The two animals kill each other, and the man is left alive to once again ponder his fate.
  4. Bob begins attending Clown College only to find that the school is actually a front for a mysterious cult. Members engage in bizarre rituals such as juggling, riding tiny tricycles, and hitting each other with pies. Bob decides it is up to him to bring down this twisted organization, and he starts a blog dedicated to exposing their secrets. It turns out that Bob hadn’t ever seen a clown before and didn’t know anything about them. He eventually realizes that what he witnessed at the college was perfectly normal clown behavior. Unfortunately, this revelation comes too late, as he has already ruined the dean’s life by publicizing his extramarital affairs.
  5. An eccentric billionaire passes away, leaving her entire estate to her 12 kangaroos. The “non-kangaroo” members of her family object, but a judge rules that the will is valid. He then puts in motion a plot that has him don a kangaroo costume and murder the eldest of the heirs. In doing so, he discovers that one of the kangaroos is actually the old woman herself in a costume! She had set the whole thing up as a way to deprive her ungrateful children of her fortune. Overcoming an initial distrust of one another, the judge and the billionaire eventually fall in love. They vow to never remove their costumes, and to never speak another word in any human language for the rest of their lives.

Story Premises

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

As I mentioned in my last post, when my wife and I were first getting to know each other, we planned on working on a fictional story together. Before we decided to tackle the Snowflake saga, we played around with some other story ideas. I recently found that list of abandoned story concepts, and actually think they are much more entertaining as fragments. Here are some of my favorites:

  1. A were-chimpanzee is terrorizing a small Nebraskan town – stealing bananas from supermarkets, gobbling up little children at night, etc. A world-famous hunter is brought in to kill it, but he eventually learns that the were-chimpanzee is actually his long-lost brother. To further complicate matters, the brother takes a liking to the hunter’s wife and turns her into a were-chimpanzee also. The entire state of Nebraska is in mortal danger of being overrun by demon chimps unless the hunter does something to stop them..
  2. A man falls into a swamp down in the Florida Everglades. Hungry gators approach, but when they get close, they suddenly turn around and swim quickly away. Why are the gators afraid of him? The man desperately tries to find out, but will his curiosity be his undoing?
  3. A man tries to pilot a helicopter through a McDonald’s drive-through. A couple of heads get chopped off
  4. A dentist has a nervous breakdown and starts giving everyone in town vampire-like fangs. The people are too polite to complain, so tourists passing through are afraid they are in Vampire Town (which is actually 20 miles south of this town)
  5. A girl actually befriends a diamond because of the cultural stereotype. Turns out the diamond was just using her cuz she had a car. Did I mention the diamond was from outer space and can talk?
  6. Mobsters just can’t seem to knock off this one squealer. They’ve tried everything: shooting him in the head, cementing his feet and throwing him into the river, putting an ignition-triggered bomb in his car, lighting him on fire…various coincidences allow for the squealer to pull through each time. It turns out, a rival mob family keeps saving this guy to make the other mobsters believe he is Lazarus.
  7. Scandal breaks out in the Catholic Church when a mysterious document surfaces which suggests that St. Patrick was murdered by leprechauns.
  8. A mad scientist becomes the laughing stock of the mad scientist community when the spider that he enlarged to be 1,000,000 x its normal size can’t even walk due to the physics involved.
  9. A man gets stranded on a desert island with his ex-wife, his 5th grade math teacher, a depressed clown, a flesh-eating squirrel, and 438 cans of tomato soup.
  10. A ghost learns of a way to come back to corporeal life but to do so, he must track down all of the organs he donated from the various recipients and return then to his body. He faces two challenges. First of all, the spell only works if he takes his organs without doing permanent damage to the recipients. in other words, he has to find them new organs. The other challenge is that he can not really move solid things, so he needs to learn how to possess people. When he possesses a nurse in a morgue, he ends up falling in love with her.
  11. Research indicates that teleportation is theoretically possible. However, matter isn’t actually transmitted, it is copied. On one end, an object is scanned and the information is transmitted. This process actually destroys the original object. On the other end, the object is recreated. A scientist is able to make a machine to do this, and decides to be the guinea pig. However the copy of him on the other side that materializes is a completely soulless thing…who happens to be nicer, smarter, better at sports and overall more fun. This is all fine and good until he starts to feel badly for is former self and he has an identity crisis.
  12. A cat burglar suddenly loses her game when she comes down with chronic hiccups.Her friends tell her she should retire, but she decides to make on last score. She knows she can make millions on eBay by selling a heavily guarded secret recipe for chicken gumbo. The only problem is that the chef is married to the doctor that is working to cure her hiccups. In addition to the logistic difficulties of the job, she has a moral crisis. How can she steal from someone who is trying to help her?

I think I might start coming up with more premises like these. It is really fun. Especially if you are a lazy story-teller who doesn’t have the wherewithal to work past the initial spark of inspiration!