This one is kind of the opposite of Friendship Series, going for breadth instead of depth.
It's sort of like Groundhog Day, or certain episodes of How I Met Your Mother.
The idea is that we have a series of stories, all of which take place on the same day. Every story is taken from the perspective of a different character. Like an ever-branching tree, there are people that character A never encounters, but character B does, and thus they get their own story.
So, it's obviously most exciting if the there's some sort of localized cataclysm, and then the story recounts how each person reacts to the event.
When they just have a small part in another person's story, they may seem one way, but when we run through their whole day we come to understand them much better.
The idea is that, in a normal story, there are the main characters and then a bunch of side characters. In this story, though, I want every character to be a main character by the end.
Character Ideas
- One guy who's cheating on his girlfriend, but is killed before he can tell her that he's leaving her.
- She also gets a whole story, wherein she loves him unconditionally, and is crushed when he dies.
- A character who encounters another who needs help, but refuses to give it and instead takes something and leaves
- Turns out he was actually a nice guy, but his child needed the item and made the call.
- He feels somewhat guilty about it, and doesn't know that the other person ended up making it
- If I'm feeling really mean, the child is dead by the time he gets back and he's completely ruined by that and the guilt that he took the item for nothing
- The child, being childish, should be pissed at his dad when he dies for not being back sooner.
- A character who is trying to get to her mother's house to see if she's alright, but is convinced that the mother was at ground zero, and so she shouldn't waste her time and that the mother is already dead.
- This is where it gets cruel. The mother is also a protagonist, and the whole story she is alone and trapped.
- She rotates between hope that her daughter will help her, sadness that her daughter must be dead, gratitude that her daughter escaped, and coming to terms with the fact that she was abandonded, anger that her ungrateful daughter would abandon her despite all she did for her, etc.
- A girl who has had a huge crush on a guy forever. She sacrifices herself to save him at some point.
- The guy, in his story, doesn't really ever notice her. When she dies for him he is shocked, confused, and doesn't even know her name.
- One guy who seems like a jackass in every else's story, and in his story is just a jackass.