OLD STORY IDEAS
1. Dialogue form: no "Saids". If someone speaks, quote is complete sentence, followed by action, talk in next sentence, first name of the one who spoke the previous sentence.
2. Gimmick to be used only once in a story---walk down street toward someone---busy street---and person EXPLODES, as personal work against some sort of thing he doesn't like.
3. Yeats does it too. Writes about how it feels to be OLD, very OLD, after a long young life, while in the middle of the young life itself.
4. All babies are born at SAME time; ALL women thus have same period, and every mother delivers her OWN, preferably for her family to watch and appreciate, with no pain, of course.
5. A year passed, then describe a month, a day, a minute, a small action, a muscular movement, a synaptic reflex, an electron's exchange.
6. A mad horror story: The children, mutations, creations of Hiroshima are being born. They come into the world, and the world shudders in amazement. Without a word of description of THEM, but only facts of their effects on others: a nurse screams, a doctor has an attack, a dog slavers, etc.
7. The reproducer, a gizmo of the future that takes protons and electrons from water (putting one and one together to make neutrons) and getting two parameters: what element? what form? and producing yards of uranium cloth or quarts of iron liquid or a ton of titanium salt. Kind of a molecular knitter---knitting matter from molecules.
8. Novels speak of the past or use flashbacks. Why not increase the span of time by looking forward in novels, without eliminating suspense or "what happened."
9. Plane wreck: thieves come up to rob the dead, find ALL but one has no money, the robber had short-lived gains. Robbers, in fear, leave money there. And, possibly, to top the topper, the thief is alive, and DOES take it.
10. Why not a collection of very small, very simple fables: "Fables for/of New Yorkers?"
11. An Evil Influence of Uranus (Uranian Zeus).
12. A Black Cat Danced Effortlessly.
13. A way to keep suspense through a novel: about someone who finds a large sum of money and has to wait three years: if it is unclaimed, it is his, but the thieves who stole it plot to get it back, but not own up to it, and the money ends up in the ground again.
14. A story of a man who reads every evening: reads from the dawn of history from the books to be lost in the fire and pillage of the Library of Alexandria. Reads through the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. Reads through the Russian translations, the modern novels, the philosophers, the poets, the reforms, until the far, screaming future---and finally dies, saying, "Gosh, it's too bad I couldn't remember what all I read."
15. What a conceit: Narrative starts at very center of hydrogen bomb, where the two halves of the atomic bomb fuse and the neutrons first reach above k = 1, and the energy levels increase to infinity. It follows this infinite point of energy out, through the bomb, to the city below, looking at the buildings, actions, people and dreams about to be vaporized, following it out to the shock and fire point, until it is only a breeze wafting a tree in some African forest, sending the parrots screaming from the trees, and slightly blowing a spider, leaping across an abyss, off his course, leaving the web incomplete---and it would have been SUCH a beautiful web.