What's an idea you have for a story that you think is really good, but don't have the skill or time to flesh out?

Life on a planet, either future earth or maybe stranded on another, where only the regions between night and day are habitable. All life needs to constantly move to be in a region of dawn or dusk. Some places near the poles could have semi-permanent civilizations that don't need to move as often.

It would probably work better as a comedy series, but I'd love to read or watch a story about a group of three conspiracy-believing idiots who manage to sneak aboard a scientific ship headed to antartica to try and prove that the earth is flat. However, disaster strikes and the ship sinks just off the coast, only for the three idiots and one scientist to survive. They have to band together to survive the aric, and end up losing their way.... and discover that the world is actually flat when they run into a giant wall of ice that extends farther up than anything could exsist and just never ends.

The main character is actually the scientist who is grappling with the idea that these three idiots he has to deal with are actually right, and he's fallen for the round earth propaganda. Maybe they run into the actual scientists who help maintain the lie that the earth is flat. I dunno.

But I like the idea of it.

With all the oversaturation of superhero content I'm surprised I haven't seen anything where all superhero abilities are lost at puberty (and still only rarely seen before that).

I can see a lot of mileage in a setting where some people are castrated to try and retain powers (maybe this works partly and dulls your power), where non superheros are exploiting children and their powers, seems like there's a good amount of potential narrative in there which I'm way too lazy to come up with myself.

I don't have a story, but I have a setting that's been really underutilized.

We, as a species, were nomadic for hundreds of thousands of years. We had tens of thousands of years of cohabitation with other hominids, intermingling, making important and powerful discoveries, exploring, etc.

And there's no one using that for a story?

The only stories about that time that I see are about dumb cavemen or ice age migration.

These people had the same mental capacity that we have now. They had culture, rituals, trade, interesting things.

So yeah, a story set in the prehistoric times.

Alien landing site is discovered by a liberal university student who's barely passing. This adds to their already crippling stress as they try to navigate the world with an alien companion and have to figure out a way to get them off world before the alien becomes a political or scientific captive.

Comedy as we watch everything go wrong to this person pushed way out of their league and past their breaking point.

I wrote a lot of star wars fanfic back 20 years ago because I was terrible at writing and couldn't afford college classes for a few semesters. I needed the practice, and the best way at the time for me to exercise that skill was forcing myself into creative writing. Those chapters and the idea of how the story would end were never finished.

In 2020, I started a DnD campaign based off those chapters, and we are still playing the same campaign. When we began, I thought I had maybe two, or maximum three years of content. Now at three years later, we are optimistically at bout 1/3 of the way through the story playing at roughly every other week.

If I had one wish, it would be to have three hours to sell the idea to Jon Favreau, because he would make it the next Star Wars saga. I've taken elements from KOTOR1, The Witcher, The Expanse, and most of the new star wars shows to create a story where my players are battling for what they believe is right, when there are no right answers.

I've been lying to my players for about three years. They believe they are bringing peace and prosperity to a shattered Republic by fighting on the side of the rebels about 1000 BBY. What they do not know is that they've been manipulated and windwashed by a sith lord into decapitating the Jedi order and acting as the admirals and generals of the rebel fleet and army.

I have been planning this for ages. All the names of recurring characters are anagrams for things like "Revan was right", "peace is a lie", and "sith lord doom", and in one part of the story, a player is actually playing his same character without knowing it, and his "new" character's name is an anagram of his original character's name.

There will come a point where he will find out he was manipulated by the story, and the other players will find out I did not tell them the whole truth of their own situation. It is going to be glorious. The party will find out they are all essentially Sith apprentices with no easy way out. And then we will get to the actual subject of the story--what it means to be a Jedi. What do you do, when everything you believed in and believed was right turns out to be a lie?

When faced with losing everything, like Obiwan Kenobi, how do you continue serving the light when it has robbed everything from you?

Nice try OP! You're not stealing my gold mine of a story idea that easily!

The first Woman president of the USA is elected as tensions with Russia and China hit a boiling point. Behind closed doors the President faces a personal battle: whether or not to come out as Trans.

A virus has rendered the population of the earth sterile. No new births. Extinction of the human race is inevitable. How would that play out? Absolute lawlessness? No more wars?

OP guy (centuries old but looks 25, good looking) lives out near the forest, almost at the edge of civilisation. He has built a small house, farms, and because his powers so incredible (give him the most OP of them all; telekinesis, telepathy, understanding of languages and concepts, unlimited mana and skill to manipulate it etc), he lives in harmony with nature.

One day, he visits the nearby town, and picks up a ragged orphan girl who was being beaten in an alley (don't ask me how, that's up to the writer). This is the story of the OP man seeing his "daughter" cross the stages of life he had forgotten about with age, come of age, go through education etc.

If possible, I'd like some comedy and some romance on the side for OP too. Thanks!

So after watching yet another time travel movie where there's a stupid closed time loop plot -- e.g. someone invents time travel, goes back in time, and gives themselves the idea to invent time travel... a colleague was wondering if there was a practical way to prevent time loops from forming (if we hand-wave away the inherent silliness of traveling back in time). That gave them an idea for a hard-science-fiction story.

The key element is the construction of a device that will produce different outcome if you go back in time and run it again, e.g. via nondeterminism of quantum-scale events like tunneling, entanglement, and so on. You would need to then buy lottery tickets based on the output of the device, then if you win, buy more tickets the same way. If you win the lottery N times in a row, you assume you are in a time loop and devote the resources you have to subvert it (while also continually buying more tickets).

If you can force a new stable state, e.g. by allowing the traveler to form the loop as before, but creating a requirement for your input... or putting it within another loop, you are now a very wealthy and powerful person.

Then you would ask a few friends to log on to a social media platform where you are have some level of anonymity and disseminate the method in a subtle way, for example in a question asking for story ideas. That way the idea is present in other minds and a removal job becomes more difficult, as it's not clear where the idea originated.

If you were fulfilling this request on Lemmy, someone would be able to go to your home instance, and find plans for such a device. It would probably look a lot like a particle detector that you could build at a low cost. They would have published first light on the detector a few weeks from when you read about this story idea.

This is story about you, who will have participated in the history of the future.

Can you find us?

This is mainly for my own self-indulgence, but I've long fancied writing an "isekai" story about someone who found himself in a "typical isekai" setting but with a twist.

Im trying to get a story running about a man in the year 3000 who finds a usb stick from the dark ages, our times!

I don't know if I would call it really good, but if I were to ever write a novel the setting would be dark fantasy like somewhere between the middle ages and the modern times where most men of the protagonists society are about to come back from a long war, but they also bring back a mysterious illness.

The protagonists were just too young to have gone to said war, but maybe an older brother did go, maybe he fell idk.
At some point the father comes home, but what was supposed to be a happy occasion turns darker because he is changed by war.

There has to be some form of secret society that has something to do with the illness or the lack of a cure for the common people.
And the young protagonists will have to deal with that situation due to circumstances and not because they were chosen or secret princes or something like that.

And I am a sucker for happy endings so while the novel would be rather dark as a whole, the ending would see a dramatic change to society with at least the potential to get better.
I think times of change make for good fiction.

I will never write that novel though, but just maybe I might get to use the setting for a TTRPG campaign some day.

When I was a kid I had this idea about a protagonist who's a serial killer but kills bad people. I think I even wrote a chapter or so, but it was probably shit. Then later someone wrote Dexter, so I don't need to worry about it any more.

Edit: it was Jeff Lindsay, the first book was in 2004. It was probably the mid-90s when I was having those ideas so we might've been thinking about it at the same time lol

Jesus as a bumbling type of guy.

Raises Lazarus from the dead. He comes back as a zombie.

Walks on water. He's using the floaty balloons you put on kids' arms.

Water to wine. Accidentally lite beer.

I think I had one other one, back when I came up with this idea when I was a lot younger. Or, maybe I said the disciples kept him around for the water-to-wine trick and didn't really like him. Whatever.

Basically my life. I’m going to have to publish it as fiction though because nobody will believe it (except possibly Stephen King, whom I suspect has also published real events under the heading of fiction).

Long time ago, I did a version of Don Quixote reimagined as a Star Wars superfan. Riding a white motorcycle with an X-Wing helmet, he travels from his home in Mantua, New Jersey to Atlantic City for a Star Wars convention. Along the way, he meets a manager of a hotel who is a little person and he mistakes for Yoda, camping out by the icemaker to prove he's ready to be given the rank of Jedi Knight, he takes on a Padawan stoner who follows on a moped, and tilts at windmills imagining them to be TIE fighters and AT-STs.

The thing writes itself, but the problem was that Don Quixote is really long and meandering.