50 story ideas for your own audio series

A good series rarely starts with a full plot. It starts with one sentence that makes you ask: and then? Here are fifty of them, sorted by mood. Use them as they are, mix two together, or change a single word and see what happens. Every one of them works as the first sentence in Tale House.

Cozy mysteries

1. A bakery in a harbor town where every loaf on Thursday hides a handwritten note.
2. The village library keeps receiving returns of a book it never owned.
3. A retired inspector moves to the Alps and the first snow uncovers a footprint that leads nowhere.
4. On a night train to Vienna, a passenger disappears between two stations, but her tea is still warm.
5. A flower shop owner notices that the same stranger orders forget-me-nots every week, for a different address.
6. In a seaside hotel out of season, the only other guest knows the owner's real name.
7. A clockmaker's apprentice finds a watch that runs exactly eleven minutes ahead, and is always right.
8. An island lighthouse has been dark for three nights, and the keeper left only a weather log behind.
9. A pub quiz in a small town where the questions start predicting tomorrow's news.
10. Two neighbors who never speak keep leaving each other clues on a shared washing line.

Love and longing

1. Fourteen years after they parted, two old friends meet again on a rooftop in Seoul.
2. A translator falls for the author she is translating, but only knows him through his sentences.
3. Two strangers share an allotment garden and only communicate through what they plant.
4. A wedding photographer realizes she's always in the background of the same man's photos.
5. Every summer, the same two people meet at the same ferry, and pretend it's a coincidence.
6. A radio host in Lisbon answers a caller who only phones in at 3 a.m.
7. Two rival chefs are forced to share one kitchen for a winter festival.
8. Letters meant for someone else keep arriving at your new flat, and they're beautiful.
9. A piano tuner and a deaf painter share a studio with thin walls.
10. An old couple decides to retrace the trip on which they first met, fifty years later.

Adventure and journeys

1. Thirty thousand years ago, a young potter crosses the mountains to trade with a tribe her clan calls enemies.
2. A cartographer is hired to map an island that appears on no chart and moves a little every night.
3. Two friends ride west in a mountain desert while the first settlers arrive from the east.
4. A young woman from the Himalaya follows her ancestors' path to an abandoned village.
5. A caravan city drifts with the dunes, and someone is selling maps to places that don't exist yet.
6. A deep-sea cable repair crew hears music coming up the line.
7. A mail pilot in 1930s Patagonia has to land somewhere that isn't on any map.
8. A group of retirees steals back the painting that was taken from their village in the war.
9. An Arctic research station receives a radio greeting from a ship that sank in 1912.
10. A girl inherits a sailboat and a list of seven harbors she must visit in order.

Fantasy and wonder

1. In a city where every door opens to a different season, someone has locked spring.
2. A generation ship's gardens start blooming out of season, two hundred years from any shore.
3. A house with twelve doors, and each one only opens on its own month.
4. Dreams are traded at a night market, and someone is buying up nightmares.
5. A cartographer of the sky notices a new star that wasn't there yesterday.
6. Every hundred years, the river forgets its course and the town must choose a new one.
7. A bookbinder can step into the books she repairs, but only the damaged pages.
8. A city of bridges where crossing one at midnight means you can't go back.
9. A girl can hear what objects remember, and a stolen violin remembers a murder.
10. The moon sends a letter, asking for someone to come and visit.

Quiet, everyday stories

1. A grandmother teaches her grandson to cook, one family recipe per episode, and one secret with each.
2. A night bus driver knows every regular passenger's story, except his own.
3. A small cinema plays its last season before closing, and each film changes one visitor's life.
4. Two sisters clean out their parents' house and find a room neither remembers.
5. A street musician plays the same song every evening, waiting for someone to recognize it.
6. A teacher's last year before retirement, told through the letters her students write.
7. A café on a ferry, and the people who only ever meet there in the middle of the water.
8. A man restores an old radio that sometimes picks up conversations from 1975.
9. A family travels through Europe in a camper van for one summer, to say goodbye to something.
10. A lighthouse keeper's last week, before the light becomes automatic.

How to make an idea your own

Swap the place: the bakery mystery works just as well in Kyoto, Recife or Hamburg.

Swap the time: the night train becomes a stagecoach or a space shuttle.

Add yourself: a character who is a little like you, or like someone you love.

Choose a mood: cozy, thrilling or romantic. The same first sentence becomes three different series.

The harbor bakery is a useful example of an image becoming a series. You do not need to know who writes the notes yet. You might first be interested in the baker who recognizes her first customers by the coffee they order. Or the boy who comes for his grandmother every Thursday. Give the world a person whose ordinary life is touched by the mystery. Then the note becomes more than a trick.

Next, choose an atmosphere. The same bakery could feel generous and warm, full of small misunderstandings and returning neighbors. It could also stand on a foggy coast where nobody mentions one particular Thursday. The difference does not come from adding more details. It comes from the kind of tension you want to spend time with.

You do not need to work through these fifty sentences like a menu. Stay with the one that gives you a question. Why has someone returned? Who owns the locked room? What can this person least afford to lose? If the question really interests you, you have chosen more than a genre. You have found a reason to want episode two.

If you are starting together, each person can choose a sentence and explain what draws them to it. One might love the journey, the other a slow reunion. Those interests can become a shared idea. You need no complete outline and do not need to agree on every turn. A place and a little shared curiosity are enough to begin.