Plot Twist Story Prompts: Forced Trust

Plot twist story prompts aren't meant for the beginning or the end of stories. Rather, they're for forcing big and small turns in the anticipated trajectory of a story. This is to make it more interesting for the readers and writers alike.

Each week, I'll provide a new prompt to help twist your story. Find last week's prompt, Bugging Out, here.

For today's prompt, force your character to trust someone who can't be trusted. Maybe two suitors vying for a person's interest find they need to team up to save said love interest from a threat (or knock a third suitor from the field of play). Or perhaps two combatants find that a third (more dangerous) threat can only be bested if they combine forces.

(5 Ways to Build Solid Relationships in Your Stories.)

Of course, the tension that drives this plot twist is that neither character trusts the other. Yet, they find no alternative to teaming up. All the while, they expect the other person to double cross them or let them down in some way. And this lack of trust hurts the team effort; so, they need to figure out how to trust each other (at least once).

Once the thing that brings them together is overcome, there is a big decision facing the writer: Do the two (or more) characters continue together on the same team? Or do they break apart? So in some ways, this plot twist story prompt can actually be considered a two-for-one prompt.

So force your character to trust someone who can't be trusted, and see what happens next.

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Have you hit a wall on your work-in-progress? Maybe you know where you want your characters to end up, but don’t know how to get them there. Or, the story feels a little stale but you still believe in it. Adding a plot twist might be just the solution.

Click to continue.