Part of Holly Lisle's
Professional
Plot Outline Minicourse, has a free Using Basic Conflicts to Build
Plot email course. It is simple to use and FREE! Sign up for the free
course and use this tool. You'll have more great ideas than you could
possibly use in your lifetime. Holly Lisle explains how to use these
random conflicts to create a plot with depth and emotion. It is simply
brilliant.
Story Idea Generator
I love this generator because instead of creating a mad-libs type
of story idea, it forces you to think. This helps you arrive at a
story idea which is uniquely your own. To use it click the
Generate New Conflicts button to come up with the three
conflicts. If you don't like the ones you receive, then click the
button again. Once you have a set of three conflicts then ask
yourself four or five questions about these conflicts (for examples
on how this works, sign
up for the free course mentioned in the sidebar).
Your Random Conflicts Are
Usage Example of This Generator
In about five minutes (and 15 to flesh it out) I came up with the
following story idea:
A college professor is forced to receive a personal RFID implant in
order to keep her job. No student, faculty, or visitors of any kind
can go on campus without one. It's part of Homeland Security's new
policies to alleviate crimes on college campuses. The professor's
husband also receives one.
One night she works late at her office, grading term papers. When
she finishes for the evening and leaves, she is surrounded by the police.
They charge her with the murder of one of her students. Their evidence is
based on tracking her whereabouts with the RFID.
Her husband admits to having an affair with the student (she cannot
even process this, to her it's unbelievable). He, too, was at the building
the evening of the murder, but tracking shows him leaving before the
murder takes place.
Through the course of the story we discover a car leaves the scene of the
crime at the same time of the murder. Its GPS shows this. The anomaly is
that nobody seems to be driving the car ... in other words the person
driving it doesn't have an implant.
So, the same technology that erroneously makes her the prime suspect must
be used to to rescue her.
Okay, this could use a lot of cleanup and tightening of the story
telling, but that's not the point of this exercise. The point is,
all of this came from the three conflicts:
.