What genre is about discovering something? I basically have this so far: Three guys want to get a way for the weekend. they head off to their cabin in the woods and that awake to a loud thud that shakes the cabin. They go out to investigate in the moonlight and see blood around the cabin and a large oversized chicken, (3' size) with bat like wings and a tail covered in scales. They start to investigate and track it to an underground lab that is experimenting in gene splicing and 'creating' animals, etc. -------- So I think that is interesting but do I need a conflict? The guys in the cabin are the protags and they goal is to try to figure out where this strange creature came from. There motivation is curiosity and adventure (strong enough?). My problem is why do I care? Why should the reader care.? OK so they found this lab... part of me is like, woop-dee-doo
Yeah you need some conflict. But you could write to find the conflict so to speak - sometimes I do this start writing and discover it along the way. Examine your characters - what if one is greedy - he sees money making opportunities, what if one has a sick child and thinks something they're doing could cure his child or is one a member a PETA and outraged. Or maybe shift to the antagonists what if they see these three men as an opportunity to try their experiments out on humans. What type of story do you want to write, a thriller, a horror, a general fiction that poses more questions on the ethics of research?
I think that is my problem. I'm not sure what kind of story I want to write. Uncertain of the genre for sure. I want to write a discovery of something shocking/freaky. Well, what I loved was the TV show called Surface - it got canned early, amazing show. There was another TV show that starred (ER and Top Gun)...Anthony Edwards. He was in a show called, Zero Hour - this also got canned. Yeah, actually mabye a thriller. I could see these guys stumbling on this underground lab experimenting with these wierd animals and something going wrong and it's mutated animals vs mankind end of the world kind of thing. mmmm...never thought of that util now. I also contemplated a 'Fly' type of story where it bites one of the men and he starts to morph into this animal himself.
That's all I do to expand ideas. Ask myself what I want it to be - genre or lack thereof, and keep changing what could happen to explore my alternatives.
I was reading an article recently about Monsanto's experiments with animals for instance: Chicken farmers spend fortunes on plucking the birds so Monsanto tried to get the gene that keeps a pig's skin bald and splice it into the chicken which created horrible results. They've also implanted female human genes into cows and produced female breast milk which will in turn be fed to babies. Other experiments going on are salmon with elephant growth genes now dubbed the Frankenfish with the idea they'll grow 50 times bigger than normal salmon. In a controlled tank, these Frankenfish eat every other fish including their own kind and while this is scary enough, there are now Frankenfish salmon in the wild - and breeding! There are tons of experiments going on - with horrific results - all over the world and it's called Pharming. The big one right now is how to re-gene chicken eggs which when laid, include different types of drugs - natural human antibodies and even cancer treatments so instead of manufacturing tablets/medicines the companies will have vast chicken coups and just collect millions of eggs every morning and dish them out to patients. You could have a really cool story using some of @peachalulu 's suggestions...
A three-foot bloody chicken is conflict enough for me. I assume that when they find the lab there will be some sort of confrontation.
Jurassic Park is classed as both "thriller & suspense" and "science fiction". It's not a "discovery" precisely, but it's a similar combination of science, horror, and strangeness.
