What are some good short story ideas and settings?

Question

Need setting, and a theme for my story.

Answer 1

I have some ideas and also some advice on how you can easily find these on your own.

First, the theme expresses your story's meaning. A single word is not a theme. You can't have a theme about "love" or "politics". A theme generates itself from your story. As you try to discover your theme, you will also begin to understand your story. In essence, a better word for "theme" is "controlling idea". But use the word "theme" around your teacher! The controlling idea is going to be a sentence that tells us how and why life changes from one condition of existence to another. This change will show up in the climax of the last act of your story.

Crime stories are made up of themes such as: "Crime pays when people are indifferent to the suffering around them" or "Justice triumphs when the protagonist takes the law into his or her own hands".

The theme of "Lord of the Rings" might be "Freedom prevails when we sacrifice ourselves". Of course we can find other themes but the controlling idea is a strong one if we can relate it throughout the story. For many writers, when they discover their controlling idea, they tape it to their computer and filter everything they write through it. It's an excellent strategy to create an excellent story with a lot of meaning.

So, how do you find your story's Controlling Idea? The controlling idea comes from your character's last action in the story climax. When you look at your ending, ask, "As a result of this climatic action, what value did your character introduce?" Then trace that and ask what is the chief cause by which that value came into his or her world? This sentence will become your theme. Your story dictates the meaning in the final climax.

So, how do you find it before you've even written your story? Well, that's part of the question when you said you need an idea. We have to come up with a premise by asking, "what if...?"

Consider someone who believes they are full of light, vigor, warmth, and love. What if you place that person into a situation where they have complete power and a powerful reward for abusing it? Will they abuse it? If you play this magic if and begin to outline your story, you can outline until the climax and get a general idea.

So, by using that idea, let's have a character, let's say a female economics professor, an intelligent woman who minds her own business. But somehow she's in a situation where she has kidnapped another woman for ransom and keeps this woman in her bedroom while running an elaborat plot to extract money from the woman's family. If you explore this story to its conclusion you could find that she 1) let's the woman go free, 2) kills the woman accidently on the way to the ransom exchange!, 3) kills the woman on purpose, 4) gets raided and captured by the police, 5) successfully pulls off the ransom, makes a 100 million dollars, and gets away with it! Explaining how that happens would be fun. But depending on each of these outcomes, we're going to have a different theme. Let's say we take number two as our climax: kills the woman accidently on the way to the drop-off exchange. Our controlling idea (theme) might be "Greed can strike and bring out the worst in absolutely anyone" or "Greed ruins lives when one feeds it" or "Compassion is false and can only be disguised". All of these will take your story in a completely different direction but the process I provided will help you find the controlling idea and then everything you write should be filtered through it, including your cast, your subplots, etc...

Concerning your setting, it could be anywhere or anything. If it was modern-day, then you could set this on a university campus. These two women could have known each other or not -- maybe she was the professor's secretary. Or you could set this in space and they're both different alien species. Or you could make one Elf and the other Beast and set it in Middle Earth. The setting accentuates your story but it's the controlling idea which makes it powerful.

Answer 2

Short Story Theme Ideas

Answer 3

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
What are some good short story ideas and settings?
Need setting, and a theme for my story.

Answer 4

For the best answers, search on this site https://shorturl.im/axmz2

i like the cruise ship setting. maybe not the fourth of july setting because... i dunno i'm not american so maybe thats why i oppose it. =P but maybe like christmas or spring break time, but they are on a cruise ship the boy and the girl are both in the same history (or some other class) class and they both are on the same cruise but they didnt know. the girl really likes the boy and has always since... four years before the time. the boy had already gone out with the girls friend (not her best friend but a very close friend) so she tried to stop thinking of him. she had been doing pretty well until the cruise. stuff happens on the cruise and they become friends but like REALLY close friends. the girl still likes him A LOT but doesnt want to ruin they're friendship once back home the girl's friend (the one who went out with the boy) notices them and freaks at the girl. the main girl explain to her friend what happened and all about the ruining friendship thing in the end though they kiss and fireworks =] it could like end during the fourth of july fire works just so you can have that in there=]

Answer 5

a guy pretends to go to a posh university, makes friends with the rich kids and tries to keep up. he even gets a girlfriend but the truth is he is poor. he has trouble maintaining the richish image without getting caught.

Answer 6

foxes and a forest

(just watched Fox and the Hound or did an hour ago)

Answer 7

setting: a new person, in a new city, looking for love
theme: trials and tribulations of falling in love, inner self awareness, and sex.........lots of it. fiction is best in this area.