Developing story ideas and plots from “What if?”

Walk down any street, read any headline or listen to any conversation and you will find plenty of opportunities to ask, “what if?”

Your question, along with the answer, could be funny, tragic, dramatic, romantic or any other theme you choose. You can be as outrageous as you want because as you develop your theme even the most unlikely occurrence can make for a good story.

Consider these:

What if an alien landed in your back garden? Not a new idea but maybe you could develop a new slant on this. Is this a funny story about how you try to communicate with the aliens and keep them hidden as they accompany you throughout your day? Maybe this is about trust; you try to help the aliens but they have a plot to destroy your town. When you discover this you realise you have inadvertently helped them with their attempts and now you have to defeat them.

What if a woman overhears a conversation where another woman talks about her upcoming wedding? This could be a thriller with the groom already being married to the first woman. What does she do? Is this about revenge. Maybe the second woman is making up the whole story. This could be a short story where the first woman is in her seventies and recalls her wedding and how her husband died shortly afterwards. Perhaps the first woman is the natural mother of the woman getting married but she gave her up for adoption as a baby.

What if electricity supplies are lost for two weeks? You decide if this is one house, an entire city or even the world. What impact would this have? Could there be a romance here as everyone pulls together? Maybe there will be crime, even murder, as people try to get hold of resources that have become limited (no freezers, no fridges, limited cooking facilities, limited heating). This could form part of the plot for a larger story, for example, an organisation could be aiming to control a nation by controlling its essential resources and services such as electricity, water, collection of waste etc.

What if you came home and your whole house had been decorated? A nice surprise? A sign of dementia? Maybe someone is trying to convince you that you have a mental health condition.

What if you look in the mirror and the reflection isn’t you?

You can ask “what if?” continuously as you develop your scene or story. What if you find treasure in a cave by the beach? What if the tide comes in and you are trapped? What if you decide to dive to escape (research how long someone can hold their breath)? What if you misjudge the exit, squeeze through an opening, and end up in another cave where you find a skeleton? What if the water is still rising? You might decide this would make a great climax for a story and work backwards to decide why you are in the cave in the first place.

Exercise

Asking “what if?” is a really useful way of coming up with story ideas and developing your plot. Keep a notebook and write at least ten “what ifs?” each day. At the end of a week select one (or more) and write at least three possible story ideas. Select one of these story ideas and write a brief outline for a novel, short story or a piece of non-fiction. Remember your question and answer could be the main story or be one part of your story. Over time you will have plenty of ideas that you can use in your writing.

Happy writing.

Using real life locations for settings and plot development

If you are setting your novel in a real location then, if your novel is set in current or historic times, most readers expect your descriptions and details to be accurate. Even if you are setting your novel in the future it is still important to consider details relating to anything that remains the same such as the distance between streets or towns. That said you can use a real location, or multiple locations, as the basis for a fictitious place and also use details from those locations to aid development of your plot.

Your novel may be set in a city of contrasts. Some people live in expensive apartment blocks with clean streets and easy access to shops and facilities. Others live in crumbling high rise flats with littered streets, playgrounds with broken equipment and high streets where the shops are mostly boarded up. Such a city may or may not exist. If it does it may not be easy for you to travel to – although online access to maps, street views and photos can be useful. You may already have a good idea about what these locations look like but detail from real life can bring your setting to life.

If you take a walk, with a camera and notebook, around your nearest town or city you will most likely find examples of some of the places and details you imagined for your book. They may not be exactly as you imagined but they will have features you can describe. For example, you may find an office block that has features that would be useful when describing your expensive apartment block – a view across the river, underground parking with security. You then might find a three-storey block of flats with balconies full of plants. A restaurant could have a courtyard area. A city park might have a pathway suitable for runners. All of these can be put together to create the apartment block and its surrounding area. It is all these tiny details from multiple places that enable you to build a picture and create a sense of place (wealthy, happy, convenient, stressful, lonely etc). This detail may also provide potential ways to add to your plot – the security guard could be a witness to a crime or the only person a resident has a friendly conversation with, the river could become a hazard or an escape route.  

Similarly, you might want to create an area that appears depressing. One boarded up shop in an otherwise modern and busy shopping centre might have some of the detail – the colour of the boards used or the way it makes you feel. The graffiti you noticed on a bridge could be transposed onto the shop front. That one broken paving slab could become many broken or raised slabs along your fictitious street.

Take notice of the detail and you can add a richness to your writing.

Exercise

1) Take a walk around your neighbourhood and make some notes about little details, also take some photos. This could be a hedge that hides the house beyond it, a pothole that cyclists have to avoid, an obstruction on the pavement that causes walkers to step into the road, peeling paint on a door, a garden full of topiary, a single shoe left on a wall, one building that is dwarfed by its neighbours, an unusual door knocker, weeds growing in the middle of a lane, a bench in a street.

2) Write an outline for a fictitious setting using elements from your notes and photos. Make it different from the actual location. That one large house might become a whole street of large houses, the small patch of untended garden might become a deserted village.

3) Write some notes that could be used in a short story or novel based on what you have seen. For example, that tiny building might be there because the owner refused to sell to developers or the bench could be a meeting place for romance or crime.

Happy writing