Stuck on your WIP? Unsure of how a scene should go? Feel as though your story is lacking substance? Enduring with the frustrations of writer’s block?
Why not try throwing in a plot twist?
A messenger brings bad news
Something important is stolen
Someone vanishes without a trace
An important item is damaged
Protagonist recognizes a face in the crowd
Someone seems to intentionally fail
Protagonist finds an item thought lost
A charitable act has a harmful result
A cruel act has a beneficial outcome
Someone unexpectedly returns the favour
A raging storm moves across town
A gift makes a character the target of a murderer
A fallen enemy makes one last attack
Only one character in danger can be saved
An enemy saves the life of Protagonist’s friend
A will from a long-lost relative appears
A secret rival seeks to replace Protagonist
A thief makes Protagonist their next target
An obscure law suddenly becomes important
Strangers mistake Protagonist for a fugitive
A tool breaks when needed most
-Captain Ellora Gladstone from 'An Unfortunate Series Of Quests'.
You couldn’t live this lie any longer. You finally confess to your blind spouse the truth of your cursed Gorgon nature, only for them to finish sipping their tea before calmly responding. “Of course you are, I’ve always known.”
I was worldbuilding two bog standard fantasy species, wise old tree dudes and impulsive little rat guys, when I realized it was far funnier if they had each other's personalities.
The rat guys think fast and talk fast, but they're incredibly conservative and like to cover all the angles before they take any action. This comes with being a prey species: their ancestral environment had lots of clever traps and devious hazards, so you get rat councils wisely working the problem.
The tree dudes speak and move slowly, but they will propose and then do the most insane things you can imagine. They can slot together a rocket in an afternoon and will then use it without so much as a test fire first. They test new potions by quaffing them down, sometimes not even waiting for it to cool (though they're tree dudes, so I guess quaffing a potion just means pouring it over their root legs). This comes from the ancestral selection process too: the tree dudes that won were the ones that took big risks, that grew faster, stronger, and tried new things without worrying about consequences. The tree dudes evolved in an era when they had no natural predators and their only competition was each other.
And this is, of course, initially confusing for any human who makes contact with them. If a giant bearded tree nods at you solemnly and tells you to go through a portal, your first thought is not that he's curious about what will happen to spacetime. And if a hyperactive little rat guy tells you with some urgency that you must accompany him into a ruined city, you won't immediately think that this is step 11 of his branching 27 step plan.
Theres a wandering immortal who has been planting flowers and trees after the fall of Humanity..700 years later the remaining survivors wake up from cryosleep to a foreign, yet breath taking earth.
Description: The creature in question looks and dresses like a cave man/woman (or Neanderthal) of varying skin tones except for their glowing pink eyes, brightly colored hair, colored spots, and dripping/melting in appearance skin.
They're usually seen only at night and, upon noticing they've been spotted, they flee—either by crawling up the wall or by melting into a drain. Leaving no evidence that they were even there save for whatever graffiti they've left behind.
They communicate mostly through grunts and other sounds and are known to be skittish around uninjured humans but, interestingly enough if they spot an injured human or animal they tend to do their best to give assistance. Especially if the person or animal in question is a youngling or an elderly.
They are passive creatures who have sightings dating back to ancient times all over the world and have different names in different places. They have also been documented as friends of the 'Never-weres.'
They paint with the hair on their hands and through the paint they seem to breath/spit out.
when the zombie apocalypse came, everyone raided gun stores. Except you. You raided a medieval armory and now, armed with full plate armor and a long sword, you will take back your home
what will your character do..
(reblog and brainstorm, lovelies! u can also write drabbles with theseee )
if they're met face to face with their plot, with no warning?
if they're stressed?
if they're happy? who will they want to share it with?
if they're sad? will they go to anyone for comfort? if yes, who?
if they're forced into a life of death situation?
if they're being threatened?
if they're kissed by their ex?
if they're confessed to by someone who they had no clue liked them? (given, they're single or not)
if their lover betrays them?
if they're coughing up blood out of the blue?
if there's a strange presence in the room, and it feels ominous?
if they discovered a dead body?
^ if the dead body is their best friend? (great question to start and develop a plot)
if their enemy is at their doorstep, bruised and injured?
if they had to share a bed with someone they don't particularly hate? ahem
if they had to be fed by someone they didn't like/their crush?
if their partner-to-be? enemy? pulls them into a secluded and shushes them? (their bodies pressing and all that!!)
when asked to choose between their family and their lover? (given the circumstances of ur story)
when kissed on their head by their enemy after a near death experience?
if they're dancing with a stranger, and the stranger says 'stop dancing, sweetheart and you'll hunted. do u wanna die?' ?
if they find out the food that served to them has glass dust on it? (who is it served by?)
when being pulled into a hug when they most need it by someone they least expect?
when they have to hold someone they loved at a gun point? why would it even occur?
when they have to choose between their own life and their lover's?
when they've to give up something (of great importance to the character) to save their lover?
I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.
A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.
The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.
The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.
A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.
A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.
Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.
Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.
Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".
Just an inspiring author posting summaries, concepts, and plot galore!
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