Board Thread:Administration/@comment-24304936-20150114214448/@comment-25383866-20150121053149

SAMMY's JAMMY WAMMY wrote: GarbageFactory wrote: How about a pre-apocalypse scenario involving a meteor or something that's going to destroy the earth? I think it'd be interesting to explore the psyches of a group of people from different backgrounds, countries, races, and religions all being confronted with the end of not only their existence, but that of the world itself.

There could be one about a man of god trying to keep his faith, or a man with cancer or something who's already come to peace with his own death, but after realizing that everyone else he knows is going to die too, resolves to live. Maybe explore how quickly people stop following the rules once they cease to matter, like maybe following a looter on a spree. Maybe a cult forms, worshipping the meteor(or something) as a second-coming of sorts- we could explore the motivations of the leader, or some of the people in it.

I think this could work because it's a very human scenario. Thrusting an ordinary person into an extraordinary situation is great fodder for writing in general. I'd love to hear what others think about something like this. The meteor is just a placeholder- I know it's been done a thousand times in hollywood already. Maybe someone else can think of another catastrophe.

Maybe it's a few million years in the future and the earth is falling into the sun. This is an excellent idea for a story, and I can see it being very entertaining, but how would you make it scarier? The idea of the world ending is a subject on many a mind, so how would you make that subject more confronting than its already made out to be. For instance Cormac McCarthy’s novel ‘the Road’ made an apocalypse setting that had people eating unborn children and basements filled with naked tortured people, which added an element of twisted occurrences that could happen but not pondered when people mention “the end of mankind”.



The fear comes from impending doom. The stories come from how people respond to the fear. The idea is not supposed to be scary on a "pursued by a monster" level. It's scary on an existential level. The situation is scary. It's the scariest situation.