Getting Story Ideas from Conspiracies

As promised (albeit a little later in the day than intended) today’s post explores using conspiracy theories to generate story ideas.

One of the great things about conspiracy theories is that they need a lot of different characters. By imagining new characters or changing aspects of the conspiracy, interesting story ideas develop. Just to show how easy it can be to find story ideas in conspiracy theories, I decided to use a random sample as my starting point.

I googled “Top 10 conspiracy theories” and used a random number generator to select a conspiracy theory from each of the first three items returned by Google. For each of these I will spew interesting story ideas for three different genres. Ok, maybe you won't find them interesting at all, but I bet they will spark ideas of your own.

1 - The USA 193 Spy Satellite – This is a conspiracy I’d never heard of before today. Apparently, this is a US spy satellite the US shot down when it couldn’t maintain orbit. Without doing any research other than the blurb on the site, here are some story ideas it could generate:

• Romance – A scientist working on China’s anti-satellite missiles falls for a handsome American diplomat. She struggles to keep the secret of her work. Work that is intended to destroy the peace her lover is trying so hard to maintain.
• Thriller – Special agent x must stop the deployment of a new spy satellite that will destroy any remaining vestige of privacy in the free world.
• Fantasy – The high frequency reconnaissance beam from the new spy satellite is rupturing the fabric of fantastica. The sprites and  goblins must unit to destroy the manmade threat before all magical creatures are destroyed.

2 - Shakespeare was not Shakespeare – This is another conspiracy I was not very familiar with.  I know there was a movie about it recently but I never saw it. Personally, I love Shakespeare, and with a name like Stratford I don’t care for the conspiracy. But it still provides all kinds of inspiration for story ideas.

• Mystery – The police believe that relatively unknown playwright x committed suicide in his Greenwich Village apartment. What they don’t know is that super popular playwright S Williams murdered x when he threatened to reveal S Williams’ habit of buying the works of others and passing them off as his own.
• MG Adventure – Young orphan X has grown up in the riggings of the theatre. He loves it and never misses show. When the plays begin to get stale X sneaks into the offices to add a little excitement to  the scripts but when the greedy theatre owner catches him, he’s in for some excitement of his own.
• Horror (or maybe comedy) – William S goes about sucking the ideas from the brains of others.  He leaves a wake of mindless thespians in the theatre district, has worked his way through parliament, and is now headed for Buckingham palace.  Can they stop him?  Will anyone notice if they can’t?

3 - The Kennedy Assassination – Everyone has heard this one and it really has been rehashed almost into oblivion. Watch how even this belabored conspiracy can generate interesting story ideas by simply picking a new, imaginary character to focus on.

• Romance – The shooter on the grassy knoll had asked his daughter to stay at the hotel. She didn’t.  When she runs from the horror of seeing her father gun down the president, she collides with special agent x. The attraction is immediate. Can their blossoming love last while he tries to save her from her infuriated father and she tries to save her father from him?
• Paranormal – The guardian angel who was supposed to be guarding JFK that day overslept. As penance he now has to try to get other politicians to accomplish the things JFK would have if he had lived. With JFK as his guide they embark on a journey to finish his life’s work.
• Sci-fi – A lab technician get his hands on tissue samples he shouldn’t have. The analyses reveal that neither JFK nor Oswald was human. Now he’s caught in the middle of an alien battle to control earth.

Now clearly all of these were just top of mind, stream of thought story ideas that would need a lot more fleshing out. The point is, with conspiracy theories so readily available; there really is no reason to run out of story ideas.

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Following are the pages on which the conspiracies were found:
Conspiracy 1 - #4 on How Stuff Works 
Conspiracy 2 - #7 on The Telegraph
Conspiracy 3 - #1 on Investigation Discovery