Plot Twist Story Prompts: Green World

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, Rumor Mill, here.

For today's prompt, make your characters enter a green world. A popular concept in Shakespearean plays, a green world is a more natural place compared to the "real world." For instance, a luscious garden perched on top of a high rise building in the middle of a city might be a green world, or an old forest (better yet "a forbidden forest") beside a town might be a green world.

(3 Tips for Picking the Perfect Setting for Your Novel.)

The thing about a green world is that it presents your characters with new delights and new dangers. For instance, your characters may be struggling to find food in the countryside, so they enter a (perhaps forbidden) forest and immediately find fruits and mushrooms; but they also find carnivorous beasts and/or poison.

Often, a green world seems very different than the world your characters were in, but it becomes obvious that no place is completely good or bad. A green world may seem to be a utopia, but there's always a price to pay for "perfection."

So send your characters into a green world, 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.