Dec 03 2010
Best premise I’ve encountered this month: Top Ten
Top Ten: “A killer who believes himself an artist of unmatched talent is incensed by being placed last on the FBI’s most wanted list, and begins killing off those fugitives above him, each in a twisted manner that serves his creative vision.” Hopefully your two-sentence synopsis is that interesting!
Hat-tip: J.A. Konrath.
…damn, now I want to read that.
Another thing I like about this premise is that it presents a slight break from reality in a believable way. In real life, the FBI doesn’t rank its top 10. If you need to adjust real life to make for better fiction, do it!
must read.
Damn that sounds good… I don’t know which I want more- a copy of the book or a time machine to travel back and steal his idea.
You can make the idea fresh for you by adapting it into another field. For example, a character feels unappreciated, so he’s driven to defeat the people that are supposedly better than him.
–What’s the field? (For example, in Top 10 and No More Heroes used serial killers and hitmen, but you can use pretty much any field where people could compete.) For example, if you had a story set in a futuristic war where the soldiers desperately wanted to get home, you might have unhappy soldiers “competing” to win an honorable discharge set aside for the first soldier to rack up five Purple Hearts (or whatever the futuristic equivalent is). Then soldiers try to collect minor wounds without losing anything important or having their schemes discovered by their superiors. For a less cynical angle, maybe the troops are competing for combat badges (like Bronze Stars or whatever), so getting out of the war means that they’ll have to be more gung-ho.
–Why does he feel this need to compete/show off? (In Top 10, I think it’s because he thinks of himself as an artist creating works of art).
–Who’s the protagonist? If it’s not the competitor, who is driven to stop this character trying to show off his talents?