This is a list of story ideas I came up with over the years and will never get around to writing. If anyone needs some inspiration, you might find one of these useful:
Write a story about a naïve, angelic child who is raised by God-like parents in a Garden of Eden type setting. The garden is surrounded by a vast labyrinth, which the child is warned is dangerous and he shouldn’t go into. However, the kid’s parents die one day and the then the garden starts to die. Getting hungry, the child has no choice but to enter the labyrinth in search of food and companionship. Or maybe the kid’s parents force him out of the garden. The walls of the labyrinth are as tall as mountains. The labyrinth also covers the entirety of a sphere shaped world. He discovers there are countless other people wandering around the labyrinth, and they each gave from gardens of their own, some of which are better than others. Everyone is lost in the maze, but few even realize it.
——————
Write a story about an MMORPG that gets an upgrade patch to improve the “none player character’s” artificial intelligence. Only it works too well and all the NPCs become completely sentient and won’t play with the characters anymore. They just ask them questions about life.
——————–
Write a hauntingly lonely and surreal cartoon about life. Everything is done in thick, scratchy black ink. The story explores the insecurities we carry with us and hide from everyone. Maybe a kid goes to the underworld of Fantasia where we hide the secrets we’re ashamed of.
——————
Write a story about a pompous dean of philosophy who is based on Bertrand Russle. He lives in a country that resembles Bosnia. A cruel dictator comes to power in a bloody coup. The dictator resembles Pol Pot. The first thing he does is round up all the intellectuals in society and send them to death camps. At the beginning of the story the professor bitches out a freshman because the naïve kid asked what philosophy is useful for. The professor explains very condescendingly that philosophy isn’t supposed to have a purpose. It isn’t supposed to be practical. In fact, it shouldn’t be practical because it’s above such mundane trivialities. Sheepishly the kid replies, “Well, if it’s useless then doesn’t that mean it’s useless?” The professor laughs at him and tells him he’s too banal to be a philosopher. After the professor is rounded up and put in a death camp he continues philosophizing to his fellow captors about useless shit such as the likeness of tables and other esoteric bullshit. In the end the professor dies in the death camp just before the naïve student of his leads a revolt and frees the camp. He gives a moving speech to his soldiers about the need to think and find purpose in our lives.
———————–
Write a story about the dead coming back to life en mass. Only the don’t’ try to kill anybody. They just bum around all morose and depress everybody.
—————————–
Write a story about a kid who’s grandmother dies. This is the first time he’s ever even heard of death or that he’s going to die one day. Within a few weeks or months he goes through the 5 stages of grief that it takes most people a lifetime to go through in regards to death.
Stage 1: Denial. He’s youthfully arrogant and believes he’ll never die.
Stage 2: Anger- He gets addicted to drugs and listens to heavy metal.
Stage 3: Bargaining- He finds religion.
Stage 4: Depression- He starts wearing turtle necks and sunglasses at night and quotes existentialist authors.
Stage 5: Acceptance- He admits that he’s going to die and he’s not scared of it and is going to focus on making the most out of life.
———————————–
Write a story about a programmer who writes a program like World of Warcraft meets Spore except there are no human players and all the characters are all capable of AI. The programmer doesn’t interfere with their lives at all. He just studies their behavior. Two scientist characters are sitting on a mountain looking at the stars wondering if there’s a God. One points to the programming and how you can see the hand of God in all of it. The other says God isn’t real because he never shows himself. They agree that if they could reach the end of the universe beyond the stars they could figure out if God is really real. They wonder if the universe is endless or if it’s like a bubble. They wonder if there are higher levels of the universe that they’d have no way of seeing just like a 2 dimensional creature couldn’t imagine a 3 dimensional world and what if there are other dimensions containing worlds we can’t see. After watching this interaction the programmer ties a noose to the server rack made from a LAN cable and hangs himself.
————————
Write a story about a kid who dies and goes to Heaven. His Heaven is a never ending Caribbean pirate saga. After thousands of years of living that life he forgets all his memories from his former life and thinks the pirate world is all there ever was and this is his mortal reality. Eventually he dies and goes to the Heaven he’s yearned for in the pirate world, which is a quiet farm life near the coast where he has sheep and a garden and a loving wife. He lives there so long he forgets he was ever a pirate. He keeps dying and being reborn into his ideal desire until he finally figures out what he’s supposed to want in life and in death. Each life he’s a little older in until the last time he dies he’s an old man. After his final death his soul doesn’t float up into the sky into another Heaven. Instead he’s born as a baby in the real world.
—————————-
Write a story about an evil totalitarian medieval king who scares his citizens with stories about how the neighboring king is an evil totalitarian king who wants to take over the people’s lives and enslave them. The king plays on the people’s fear and manipulates them into giving up their freedoms so he can protect them from the neighboring king. In the end it turns out that king is also running the neighboring territories as well and doing the exact same thing in each of those territories.
——————————-
Write a story about a colonial New England town in which a genius builds a steam punk thinking machine in his barn. He uses it to solve all of the town’s problems. When word gets out about the machine everybody starts coming to ask it every question. Eventually the lines get so long to ask it questions that they ask it how to solve that problem. It tells them how to build a network of phone lines to connect the machine to their houses. So they can just call it from their home anytime they have a question. People use the thinking machine for generations and the village is absolutely peaceful and utopian. However, eventually the machine breaks down and nobody knows how to fix it. They get angry and lynch the machine. Nobody can solve any of their problems anymore because they don’t know how to ask themselves questions. Life devolves in the colony until generations later nobody remembers the thinking machine existed. The town is an idiocracy, and the barn has since been turned into a television studio where a day time talk show is filmed.
——————–
Write a story about a civilization in the clouds. The people embody sea-faring stereotypes. They ride around on flying ships and fish for birds. Some people get let down on ropes and explore what’s below the clouds.
————————
Write a story about a village society built around a philosophy about relaxing. To them relaxing is the ultimate virtue, and all virtues ultimately tie into relaxing. A displaced village of people whose society is built around stress show up. The two societies hate each other. The plot revolves around a Romeo and Juliet love story between two people from the rival groups.
———————-
Write a story that takes place in a steam punk future. They have the same technology we had in the 1920’s though. Everyone is very excited about the future there. Between technological progress and social progress everyone believes a truly utopian society is just around the corner. The story explores the things society does to prevent it from fulfilling its dreams.
————————
Write a story about a business office where everyone wears pajamas to work. You don’t have to worry about offending people. Everyone says what they mean. Everyone questions their bosses and aren’t afraid to speak the truth. Everyone gets profit sharing. There are no set work hours. Performance and aptitude are more important than credentials. Bullying is severely punished. The company’s motto is “We go out of our way for you to the extent that you go out of your way for us.” The leaders aren’t paid more than their subordinates if the subordinates to harder work than their boss. Employees are punished by losing privileges before they’re punished by getting fired or getting a black mark on their permanent record.
——————
Write a story about a prince who turns 14 and gets his first harem. His dad explains the art and purpose of sex.
——————
Write a story that takes place in Biblical times. The protagonist is a career petty criminal who keeps accidentally ending up in the same town as Jesus. The criminal is a good hearted guy. He’s not Disney innocent. He’s an immoral guy who hurts other people in little ways, but it’s because he’s just dumb. His mother drank when she was pregnant. His dad abused him. He didn’t get much schooling and doesn’t have any job skills and nobody will give him a chance. He sees Jesus save the life of the adulteress, and since he’s wanted by the cops he asks Jesus if he’ll save his life too. He explains his circumstances to Jesus and Jesus tells him he doesn’t have an answer for the kid and can’t help him. Maybe they end up getting crucified together.
———————
Write a story about a wizard who is also a gunslinger.
—————
Write a story about a CEO who is pissed because his workers are too happy, and the CEO believes that if you’re happy at work it must be because you’re goofing off or doing something wrong. He says if you have time to be happy you have time to work. He hires an emo demotivational speaker to shake up the office and make everyone less happy so they’ll work harder. By the time the emo is finished ruining the work place everyone is miserable. Their best workers quit, a bunch of people start spending all day out in the smoking section smoking to get out of work and calm their nerves from all the stress at work. A bunch of people start coming in hung over from drinking at night to kill the pain of how much their job sucks. People start stealing from the company to make up for having to put up with a shitty job. People stop working as hard and cutting out early. Within a year the company goes bankrupt and the CEO figures all of his people are just worthless pieces of shit.
—————————
Write a story about a place in the countryside, where one night a year all the scarecrows gather.
————————–
Write a story about an unemployed auto worker who is living in Detroit after the fall of capitalism. He sits around and drinks vodka all day. He was once a proud, proud member of the capitalist party, and now he feels betrayed by his country and is heart broken about the fall of capitalism. The guy parodies a once proud and loyal soviet who lost heart after the fall of communism.
—————————
Write a story about a future where Christianity is replaced by New Age as the dominant religion.
———————-
Write a story about a baby who was part of a government experiment. The government injected stem cells into the brains of babies who were left at the hospital after birth for a long time because they were sickly for one reason or another. They did this without the parent’s knowledge or consent. The government was going to follow the lives of these babies (the ones that survived anyway) to see if the experiment made them super smart. If so the government was going to hire them. However, the program got shut down for ethics violations and the kids were never followed up on. One became a natural genius who could figure out pretty much anything pretty easily. The world made sense to him. However, he was extremely poor and abused and didn’t have much chance in life. He got in trouble a lot as a kid for not following the rules. He went to college for a year but dropped out because he argued with his professors too much. He joined the military but got kicked out for arguing with his bosses. He got a shitty job at an office but got fired for arguing with this bosses. Every time he argued with people it was because he saw a better way to do things. Finally he decides he’s just an insane, stupid piece of shit and kills himself. Or maybe he moves out into the country and figures out life on his own. He comes back to society to tell everyone that he’s got all their biggest problems figured out. Society lynches him.
——————–
Rewrite the story of Jesus except tell it like Jesus was a black, southern evangelical preacher.
———————
Write a story about a kind hearted doctor who works with the elderly. He sees their suffering and has many people beg him to kill them and put them out of their misery. Eventually he agrees and starts helping terminally ill patients end their lives because there’s no point is pointless suffering. People start becoming suspicious. So he takes a job helping refugees in a 3rd world country. He sees their suffering and how needless it is that they should suffer because they have no resources when 1st world countries have excessive resources. He blames the elderly who contribute nothing to society. So he goes back to America eventually and starts killing old people indiscriminately. He notices a lot of their children are getting a lot of inheritances out of this and winning law suits against the nursing homes their parents were in. Their kids are dumb and are wasting their money on bullshit they don’t need. So the doctor starts killing stupid people. Then he starts killing retarded people. Then he starts killing prisoners. Then he starts killing people on welfare. Eventually he decides to just kill the entire world.
——————————-
Write a story about a guy whose life has become unfulfilling. He decides the source of his problems are that he’s lost his inner child. So he decides to go on a quest to find his inner child. He decides the only place you’re going to find your inner child is in your imagination. So he takes some acid and places himself in a sensory deprivation chamber. He hallucinates walking into a dream world based on his subconscious. At first everything is dark. The deeper he goes into his mind the more elaborate it gets. He meets a slew of “Wizard of Oz” type characters who are based on elements of his subconscious who help point him towards his lost inner child, who is the king of this land. Eventually he finds out the king is being held in a dark, disgusting, inhumane prison cell by his inner demons. He has to fight his inner demons to save his inner child. His inner demons are based on his earliest childhood fears.
——————
Write a story like “Cube.” In fact, make it what “Cube” should have been. Instead of a 3 dimensional cube the people are lost in though, the building they’re trapped in only has one floor (with a very high roof though), and through every door is a long hallway. The whole building is an endless maze of nearly identical hallways.
———————
Write a story about a kid who starts a political movement (that starts at his school) to allow people to wear pajamas anywhere they want. He organizes “pajama-ins” to force people to experience being surrounded by people in their pajamas so they’ll come to see it as normal and even see how enjoyable it is and that there’s no reason not to wear pajamas everywhere. People debate about it using the same arguments for and against recreational drug use. In the end the kid gives a big glory, glory hallelujah speech and reiterates the dreams of our forefathers and makes wearing pajamas look like the ultimate goal of all civilization and the tipping point of world peace.
———————————–
Write a story about a group of aliens visiting earth. The aliens own office buildings, houses, factories, etc. around Earth. They’ve made the buildings so the aliens can see through the walls but the humans can’t. The aliens stand in chambers behind the walls and watch how the humans behave in their natural habitat. Professional scientist aliens study the humans, and they often bring school buses of alien kids to see the human zoo.
———————————
Write a story about a gang of undead bikers who ride their bikes across the sky.
————————-
Write a story that takes place in the modern world where people go to their regular jobs and school and the story and everything except we talk and think like primitive hunters and gatherers. The story is about a father raising his son to be a warrior and a mother raising her daughter to tend the camp.
————————
Write a story that takes place in Biblical times. It’s about a loose affiliation of desert monks whose thinking is a combination of Arabic mathematics and Greek logic. The monks devote their lives to the use of pure reason in figuring out the universe. They send letter to each other sometimes when they need help solving a problem or brainstorming. Periodically they’ll meet and discuss things. One of their members is stupid and not very good at logical thought. He prefers subjective, artsy, whimsical romanticism. Eventually he gets kicked out of the order. When he goes back to society he starts talking to people about his naïve views on life and interjects some of the conclusions the other monks came too, but he doesn’t give them credit. Eventually people start worshipping and following him. He has this idea that everybody is God, which he does a bad job of explaining. People just catch onto the idea that he said he was God. Eventually he gets crucified. The monks hear about this and steal his body from his tomb and bury it in a pit of piss, shit and garbage to show their disdain for how he corrupted reason.
—————————
Write a story about a government-employed building inspector. He inspects a sweatshop, but he’s too busy nitpicking the minor building code infringements to notice the who place is an illegal, inhumane, corrupt, exploitive business. He gives the owner a minor fine and tells him to get his shit together.
——————————
Write a story about a boy who is raised by toys.
———————————
Write a story about a monastery of monks who have no religion. So they decide they need to get on the ball. They start making up rituals, and they find they’re very good at it. After several hundred years of studying the art of rituals they create a sophisticated religion revolving around obeying rules and performing rituals. However, they never created a God to worship. Eventually schisms start forming in the religion about how to worship and which rules to follow. Arguing leads to fighting. Fighting leads to killing, and eventually the whole things goes to shit and they nearly wipe themselves out. One naïve, young monk starts studying their history to figure out where they went wrong and how their perfect religion could bring about so much wrongness in the world. Eventually he discovers that they defined God, which should have been the first thing they did before defining how to worship God. He tries to tell this to the other monks, but they accuse him of heresy and try to kill him. He runs off with the few monks who listen to him, and they start their own order based on determining the nature of God. Eventually they decide that God is everything and everyone. All the physical matter in the universe is God’s “body.” God’s mind is the mathematics that controls the behavior of the universe. God gave life to his body. Plants are his hair. Each part of the ecosystem is like different organs of his body. We are the eyes and ears of God. When we’re born a new eye of God opens. When we die that eye shuts. We’re different perspectives of the same person. When we meet anther person we’re meeting our self from a different perspective. The monks create a very small and loose system of worship and rules based on this understanding. They try to share it with their old monk friends and are all promptly and brutally killed for heresy. While they’re being killed another rival faction of the old religion sneak attacks them and kills them too.
————————-
Write a series of stories about settlers that live past the edge of civilization in the zombie frontier 100 years after the zombie apocalypse. The zombie invasion turned out to be caused by parasites the size of germs or gnats that eat your brain and take over your body. It’s unclear whether the parasites are extraterrestrial, genetically engineered, or the product of natural evolution. Anyway, they take control of dead bodies because living bodies will fight off the infection. If you get bit by a zombie you’ll get sick for a while, but 99 times out a 100 you’ll get better. But when you die you’ll definitely turn into a zombie. If you never get bitten you can still carry the infection dormant in your body if you contracted it another way. Scientists are working on a vaccination, but they aren’t having any luck. The law says you have to burn your dead or cut their heads off so you won’t come back to life. But there’s no shortage of dead bodies in the world, and the parasites find new graveyards and such on a regular basis. So the world is still covered in zombies that humans hunt and hide from. And there aren’t that many living humans left. An unlikely group of people who come together for different reasons on the zombie frontier discover that the zombies behave like ants. They even use pheromones to communicate with one another. There are worker zombies who are fairly harmless. There are fighter zombies who are ferocious. There are stud zombies and only a couple of queen zombies in the world. This group of people fights through a zombie hive and capture a zombie queen. They question it and then kill it.
————————–
Write a story about a super hero who is over worked. He sits down to figure out how he can fight evil more efficiently. He comes to the conclusion that what makes super villains most effective is their use of henchmen. So he decides to get henchmen of his own. Funding his henchmen becomes as big of a problem for him as fighting crime. Eventually he has to turn to a life of crime to fund his henchmen.
————————–
Write a story about a child who goes walking down the path to adulthood. Eventually he comes to a cliff wall that’s impassable. The road leads into a cave in the cliff that’s pitch dark inside. The child goes in and faces his fear of the unknown. When he come out the other side the landscape is nicer than it was on the previous side. He follows the path for a while until he reaches another identical cave. Again he fears the unknown, but the details of his fear those of a slightly older person. He faces his fear and walks through the darkness again. When he comes out the other side the world is nicer than on the previous side. He keeps repeating this process until he’s faced all his fears. Then he realizes he’s been walking in a circle the whole time. He kept passing through the same unknown cave and the only thing that changed was him.
———————–
Write a story that takes place on a playground. All the children have mirrors for faces. So everyone sees themselves in the faces of everyone else. Conflicts are caused by people assuming everyone is just like them.
——————–
Write a story about a kid who lives in a desolate wasteland where life sucks shit for everyone. There’s an ivory castle that reaches up to the sky in the horizon. Sometimes you can hear music come from it or smell good cooked food. But nobody has ever actually been to the castle. There’s propaganda everywhere you turn your head telling you that you live in the greatest nation in the world. The kid goes through his day and is super proud to live in the greatest nation in the world.
———————-
Write a story about a world where everyone’s life eventually became exactly the same. Every movie was exactly the same. Life became maddeningly predictable. It started driving one guy who noticed crazy. He bitched a few people out and told them what their lives were going to be like, and after a few days the people came back to tell him his predictions were right. They assume he knew because he was psychic. The guy decides to run with it and becomes the world’s most famous and revered psychic.
———————–
Write children’s horror stories that warn about the real dangers of modern life.
————————-
Write children’s fables based on basic intro to psychology level principles. Just open up a psychology text book and base a story on each entry in the index.
——————–
Write a story about a mobster named “Bedtime Story.” He got the nickname because right before he would whack a guy he would tell them a bedtime story that taught the lesson that, had they learned, would have prevented them from fucking up the way they did that led them to getting whacked. Bedtime Story was a really big guy and a little slow in the head. He didn’t tell the stories to be sadistic. He honestly thought that the people should know what they did wrong before they suffered the consequences because otherwise you’d never learn. The fact that it didn’t do the dead any good was lost on him until one day his fellow mobsters were heckling him for it. So he decided they were right, and he hired a typists to type down all of his bedtime stories as he dictated them to her since he couldn’t type. The book was published, and it contained enough evidence to put half the mob behind bars. So Bedtime Story got whacked. The whole story is told in the form of a eulogy at his funeral where a mobster tells the bedtime story of how Bedtime Story fucked up and got whacked.
———————-
Write a story in which the concept of bedtime stories is personified by a person who becomes a celebrity. At the peak of his career he entertaining, singing, doing poetry, telling stories, educating, doing public service announcements, teaching history, etc. Everything is going great for him until Books comes on the scene. Books quickly starts taking his business and his attention. There’s a brief but bitter rivalry between Bedtime Stories and Books, but once they get to know each other they fall in love and get married. Everything is going great for them until TV comes on the scene and starts stealing most of their business and attention. Bedtime Stories and Books have to downsize and specialize in niche markets. Bedtime Stories is getting old and weak and is relegated to small time novelty gigs. Bedtime Stories and Books thought things couldn’t get any worse until Video Games arrived on the scene. TV and Video Games immediately fell in love and got married. Bedtime Stories fell into a coma, and since Books was barely making a living anymore, Books couldn’t take care of Bedtime Stories and Bedtime Stories died quietly in the night and nobody noticed it happen.
——————–
Write a story about a group of hikers who spend years preparing for their greatest hiking expedition. They all their gear loaded up and pep themselves up and set out on their great hike. Through the ordeal they face hardships that they overcome. They grow closer together and learn valuable lessons together. Above all they learn the value of staying positive and pushing yourself to the limit. However, despite their positive outlook, more and more problems keep plaguing the group until some of them start dying. Still, they find ways to deal with the deaths and press on optimistically. Still though, problems keep plaguing the group, and more of them keep dying. Some of them start to whisper that they might be doing something wrong. Their leader bitches them out losing heart and doubting. He gives a glory, glory halellujiah speech about the doubt tears you down. Finally, the smart, sickly member of the group has enough and stands up and screams at the leader telling him that they need to admit that their expedition is failing and if they don’t admit it and change what they’re doing they’re all going to die and that there’s nothing positive about that. The leader asks him what they should change, and the kid tells him that the reason their expedition is failing is because they never had an end goal picked out. So they’re just going to wander aimlessly in the wilderness until they all die. The leader denies the allegations and insists he’s not lost and he knows exactly where they’re going. The kid pulls out a map and shows how he’s been charting their movements and they’ve just been going in erratic circles.
———————-
Write a story about a guy who decides to start telling everyone in his life that he’s terminally ill so people will treat him better and more real.
———————–
Write a children’s story that takes place in a land of Kings and Queens, fairy god mothers, wizards, trolls, Robin Hood, etc. A young boy and a young girl grow up in a poor town. The children are unusually intelligent. There seems to be something special about them. Their parents tell them they’re really royalty, and one day they’ll be taken back to the castle and be a prince and princess and then one day be king and queen. This makes the kids happy, and they laugh and skip through life never really preparing for the future because they believe positions of royalty will be handed to them one day. Unfortunately, their parents were lying to them the whole time to make them happy. One day they grow up and ask when they’re going to get to be king and queen. Their parents look at them like they’re stupid and tell them they were never going to get to be king and queen. They’re poor and that’s the ways it is and they’re going to have to work hard doing shitty work the rest of their lives…all the more so because they spent their whole childhoods playing and not learning advanced skills. So now, because they were irresponsible they’re going to have to do backbreaking manual labor since they have no skills. And they didn’t live happily ever after.
——————
Write a story about a future where business leaders realize it’s inefficient to pay people set hourly wages because it only punishes the hard workers and rewards the lazy workers. So people get paid per function. Barbers get paid by the haircut. Secretaries get paid by the phone call or document. Managers get paid by the performance review. Repair men get paid per item fixed. Grocers get paid per item sold.
——————–
Write a story about a kid who wins a “Willy Wonka-esque” lottery. The prize is that he gets to rule the world. The story follows him as he starts off thinking it’s all fun and games and then gets bogged down with work. He also starts off wanting to help every bleeding heart until he gets taken advantage of too much and work stops getting done and he has to become more callous, but eventually he becomes too callous.
——————–
Write a story about a little peasant girl lives in medieval times who falls asleep on a stack of hay. She dreams that she meets a talking animal who says he’s from the future. His windmill shaped time machine is broken, and he promises to take her to the future if she helps him fix it. She does and he takes her to the future. The future looks how a medieval peasant would imagine the future to be. It’s an extrapolation of medieval technology and customs.
————–
Write a story that begins before time when all that existed was the mind of God. God decides to grow himself a body to put his mind into. So he creates the universe. Eventually humans build artificial intelligence. Eventually they start colonizing other galaxies and learn to harvest the power of stars. The Internet stretches across galaxies. The AI on the Internet uses the combined computing power of the Intergalactic Net to develop technology without the help of humans. Eventually it figures out how to jack itself into the fabric of space and time and turn the entire universe into one endless super computer. When it does God comes to life.
———————-
Write a story that takes place in an office. There is a war between the managers and the workers.
———————
Write a story about a terrorist suicide bomber who dies and goes to Heaven. When he gets there he meets his 77 virgins. At first he’s ecstatic until he finds out that the 77 virgins are meant to remain virgins for all eternity. Instead of fucking him their role is to torture him as punishment for killing innocent people.