I have a friend who loves to create cool optical contraptions with mirrors (and he is very good at it). Today I was telling him how watching him work gave me an idea for a story:
A man who loves to invent things with mirrors becomes sad that one day he will die. It isn’t that he fears death, but that he feels sad about all the great mirror inventions he will not get to make. One day he is visited by a supernatural being who offers him unending life. The man happily accepts the gift, only to find that he has been turned into a vampire (and we all know about vampires and mirrors).
It occurs to me that there could be an entire genre of ” tragically ironic story ideas”. If you like, you could go ahead and write the actual story (or play, or movie, or poem, or opera, or country song), but the idea itself could be considered a work all on its own.