Dystopian Story Ideas

Dystopian premises with one wrong rule. Pick a line and let your group write the cost of living under it.

1. Citizens are issued a daily allowance of words. The protagonist is a poet.
2. Children are matched to a career on their tenth birthday by an algorithm. One match is 'monarch'.
3. A city has banned crying in public.
4. The country's last newspaper prints only the weather and obituaries.
5. An election is held but the ballot has one question and no options.
6. Adults must keep one secret from the state. The protagonist has none.
7. Schools are closed and replaced with a single televised lesson.
8. A teenager applies for permission to be remembered.
9. A family is rationed one shared memory per week.
10. Citizens are required to file a daily expression of optimism.
11. The state issues a list of approved dreams.
12. A poet is conscripted to write the national anthem and accidentally writes a confession.
13. A village is selected as the country's last permitted private library.
14. A teacher is asked to teach a syllabus she wrote in a previous life.
15. A retired engineer is asked to dismantle the last working radio.
16. A young couple wins the right to have a child by lottery.
17. A satellite is reprogrammed to ignore one specific country.
18. An office of bureaucrats discovers their entire department doesn't exist.
19. Citizens receive a phone call from the state every year on their birthday and are required to answer one question.
20. A historian is told to rewrite this morning's news.