Ideas

Every day, I intend to write down 10 ideas (“intend” being a key word). Here they are:

1. A wine merchant who cannot help but get drunk on their own supply.
2. A wine merchant who is now sober and runs AA meetings.
3. A novel centered around a character who intentionally uses MacGuffins to learn a language (or accomplish some other task – perhaps to get out into the world to meet a woman, for example), causing them to get pulled into exceedingly wild stories a la Night is Short, Walk on Girl.
4. An illiterate character (in a post-apocalyptic society, probably) who somehow understands the importants of books, and builds a magnificent library. The perfect antilibrary – the one you cannot read.
5. A novel that explains what literary techniques it uses, like MacGuffins, flashbacks, etc. like how a magician tells you what they’ll do and still tricks you.
6. Character: Older beach/dharma bum who has retired to southeast asia, never learns the language and just sort of extracts from local cultures while espousing hippy vibes
7. A story focusing on a group of tuk-tuk drivers. Or even just a single one!
8. A breakfast-club-like situation where the group is random strangers in a hostel.
9. Parts-work as a novel, or a frame narrative where the frame is going to therapy. (Dear reader: yes this is just the movie Inside. Hush.)
10. Opening scene of a novel is in a dark, enclosed space. (Cue Chance the Rapper: “I was in a dark space / between a rock and a hard place / …”, this is literally the start of the music video.)
11. A reverse Truman Show – a man streams his entire life to 0 viewers.
12. Something like When We Cease to Understand the World but around foreign service workers during the Khmer Rouge, the Holocaust, etc.
13. A retelling of Abraham and Isaac but where no ram appears.
14. Setting: a character is performing on stage, but they can see nothing past the bright stage lights. A coup or attack or sabotage unfolds.
15. A superintelligent AI controls the world by never proliferating but only by slowly nudging humanity towards the world it wants. (Kinda like that bit from Sapiens that argues that wheat domesticated humans.)
16. A history of hair: why some people shave, why others braid, why some cut hair but others don’t, etc.
17. Character: an old blind watchmaker with a very fine touch, does everything by memory and feel.
18. A story structured like Escher’s “Impossible Stairs”, where it’s multiple stories but is unclear where one ends and the other begins. “The Waves” but for entire worlds.
19. An AI whose job is to send metta to the world.
20. A novel that is just a character catastrophizing or plotting the huge web of possibilities into the future, and the further down we get the more divergent the paths get.
21. A multi-generational narrative following a single Ludite family (or someone like the Amish) far into an AI-driven future.