For those of us who know what we want to write, but not necessarily how.
I think I have a pretty fertile imagination, especially from the few dreams that I remember, but I can't write narratives worth a damn. Whenever I start writing, it's a struggle to get through the first paragraph, and then when I read it again I just go, "lol what was I thinking?" and delete it.
One of them is sort of a vision I saw for a prospective video game. The plot originally came in a dream (don't laugh) that I saw as a Soviet Russia-style reversal of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. The
player character is the "Hyde", a bloodthirsty rogue who is sent out to do some rather unsavory tasks, including thievery and assassinations. Each of the tasks has some puzzle elements to it that increase incrementally in difficulty. You have a limited amount of time to accomplish each task because if you dilly-dally too long, the potion will wear off. Completing each mission
without excessive violence is the ideal, there are multiple ways to solve problems, such as luring the target into a trap. After each mission is complete you fall into an amnesia and only wake up again when you are needed to accomplish the next task, which is conveyed to the player via cassette tape or some commands scribbled on the wall. (Many, but not all, are left by the "host.") The missions are seemingly unrelated due to the amnesia that occurs in between each one.
In the second part, the player is awakening involuntarily and is allowed to view the consequences of his actions on the city. The city-state has become a totalitarian dictatorship completely isolated from the rest of the world. No one gets in or out. The player has unwittingly been a "tool" for conducting a coup. The host, as the player eventually learns, was formerly a member of a secret government expidition into some mines of mysterious origin (but strongly hinted to be extraterrestrial or supernatural in nature). They discovered a magical substance and the "formula" for literally crafting new souls - personalities, memories, and all - and placing them in other people's bodies. The government, shocked at the possibilities of this discovery, started resorting to more and more totalitarian measures to destroy anyone who would attempt to take advantage of it. Members of the expidition and anyone who supported studying the ruins further were assassinated or drummed out of the public sphere. Eventually, there were only a dozen or so members of the expidition left. In secret, they perfected the formula for creating perfect obedient assassins and used it on themselves with the aim of a coup. That's how the player was created.
... I know it's really sloppy and incomplete, and I'm not great at writing as you can probably see above. Plus it's probably been done before.
TL;DR:
Jekyll and Hyde meets
Julius Caesar in alt-universe Soviet Russia.
So... do any of you care to share your plotbunnies with the class?
