Category: Story Ideas

AN: Crack? Or Genius.

So I built this story entirely off the title. I just thought it was a funny idea and decided to roll with it. This is a foil to the Gun Knight idea. Instead of having a character you’ve grown to care about get saved late into the story, what if you have a character you have no investment in die off in the first chapter, and then grow to care about them.

So, you see a man get shot by a mugger (the how of the death isn’t that important, just that it happens,) and get to go through the funeral processions. The man dies, and every other chapter will take place at his grave. Each chapter can have a different person from his life show up, and just start telling stories about the man. For example, maybe his daughter could show up, and she needs advice about something, say, whether or not to go to her hometown college or to go out of state, and she’ll just start talking at the grave, “you always knew what to do” etc. She’ll talk about that time he had a similar decision to make as a kid, and how he told her about that time, when he “honestly just flipped a coin.”

The story would be short-ish, having maybe 10 chapters, and would end with a final chapter that goes over what happened with all the different characters. How all of their conflicts had been resolved with the advice they had been given in life. The goal of the story is to try and gain relation to a character you only know through other peoples anecdotes.

AN: This is what started my hobby of coming up with stupid story ideas, so I’m going to finally put this on paper.

Anyone who reads web-comics knows the idea, a character is introduced as a weakling, and in the first couple episodes, they get some life-changing event and somehow end up with a secret ability, making them incredibly powerful. The problem with this style of story is nobody would care if that character actually just died. The readers don’t know the character, they feel no attachment to the character, they don’t care about the character. My idea with Gun Knight could really be any sort of story, Gun Knight is just what came to my mind originally. The story of Gun Knight follows a, believe it or not, knight. Just a regular knight, wields a spear, goes on quests, and you continue to follow his story of just a regular knight. He’ll make companions, he’ll develop his skills, but he won’t get a gun.

After this story has been going on for a while, say, 30 chapters, and the readers can actually feel a connection to the MC, he’ll take on some quest, the biggest one yet, to, say, kill the dark lord. The knight will take his companions and embark on the journey. He’ll fight against the forces of evil, and eventually confront the dark lord himself. And he’ll lose. Our MC, the one the readers have gained an understanding of, the one the readers actually care about at this point, will be on the brink of death, and only then, would he acquire his gun. An angel or something will fly down from the heavens, and finally gift our knight with an m1911. The knight can use that to defeat the dark lord, and more story will be added on.

The main idea is to show the character living a life, make them an actual character the readers can root for, before you put them in the near death situation. Before you give them the deus ex machina that saves them and makes them powerful. It doesn’t have to be a knight, or a gun, it just needs to make the readers care whether or not the MC dies, otherwise you could end up with a story where the MC legitimately just dies at the beginning and nobody cares.