The Writing Process 2: Skeletons (Closet and Otherwise)

Out of the two seeds given, only the first one fired up my imagination to some extent.

"While guarding a caravan for his lord, a samurai is faced with an unexpected form of danger."

Danger? What kind of danger are we talking about here?

If you're a samurai guarding a caravan, you have a number of obvious threats to deal with. Bandits would probably be number one on the list. If you're slogging through foreign territory, you'd probably be watching for enemy patrols. And in the twisted world of L5R, there's always the chance that you'll run into a monstrous oni (big, nasty demon) or somesuch.

All of them are hardly "unexpected" forms of danger. So the first major question I ended up asking myself was, if you're a samurai guarding a caravan, where would you least expect the threat to come from?

And the first answer that came to mind was, "the package". But how in the world could the contents of your caravan be a threat? And to that, my sadistic mind answered, "Because it carries something dangerous inside it. Something that the box is supposed to contain. Something with huge, ravening teeth."

So the samurai in the story is guarding a caravan tasked to deliver a box... a box that contains a captured oni. There's the threat right there.

How to make it unexpected, then? Maybe the box looks like an ordinary box. That should be safe enough to assume, because if you've captured an oni, then you don't want to panic the entire countryside or draw attention to yourselves in the process. Of course, any samurai tasked with such a duty would be required to know what the box contains, only the sheer beauty of the idea was that the reader didn't have to know what was inside until the closing moments of the story. Unexpected, indeed.

So you have a samurai guarding a caravan, and he's doing his job with a particular degree of vigilance. Bandits suddenly attack the caravan, slaughtering the samurai's party but leaving him alive for some reason. The bandit leader laughs at the samurai's desperate attempts to convince him not to open the box. And when the package is finally opened despite all the samurai's efforts, it is revealed to contain a powerful oni, much to the horror and final understanding of the reader.

Little details now. The samurai has doubts about his current position (he's transporting an oni, after all), but his loyalty to his lord suppresses any instinct he has to fear the creature inside. The party is composed of both samurai and shugenja (magic-users), because only shugenja can make sure that the oni is contained. The box is enchanted with a set of magical wards for added security. The oni may be stuck in the box, but his whispers for freedom are still heard by the samurai and his friends, and they must constantly watch each other for signs that any of them may be corrupted by the oni's wishes.

Good skeleton there. The next step was to actually start writing the story.