Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
So... who's got an idea for a serial-ready plot?
(And if anyone says "sparkly vampires"...)  |
1) Murder on campus: investigators must interview a number of students & teachers and visit a number of locations; this breaks up easily into short sections.
2) Bomb threat downtown: A terrorist calls in a threat to the local news; getting information to police & politicians and investigating the reality of the threat and tracking down the caller work nicely as a serial. Each chapter can end with either a small victory. ("We cleared the library without scaring the visitors! Yay!") or a cliffhanger ("what do you mean third graders are visiting city hall today? No!")
3) First Contact: We land on a planet with aliens & need to convince them (1) we are not food (2) we don't think they're food (3) we need an alliance to help avoid/defeat the local variant of Predators/Alien Queens/nanobot invadors. Chapters can alternate between politics/negotiations and alien culture/physiology.
4) Psychic thriller: a scientist discovers "dreamwalking;" chapters focus on different groups' use & misuse of this new technology while a serial killer is apparently using it to commit murder through nightmares.
5) Romantic comedy: One's a department store clerk; the new beloved (of whatever gender author cares to write) is a parking attendant; their days are plagued with rude and clueless customers with variants of anecdotes snagged from
NotAlwaysRight.com. They swap stories in the breakroom and fall in love with each other.
6) Life swap: A pair of adult identical twins complain to each other at a family holiday that they each have the most miserable life. They make a wager & decide to swap for a year, each pretending to be the other to see whose life is *really* worse.