A missed train. An unreturned phone call. A mistakenly grabbed Starbucks coffee cup. The idea of a single moment changing everything is entwined in storytelling. In fact, it’s a major story beat in the craft of writing: the inciting incident.
Yet there’s a specific genre that takes this further by incorporating it not as a story beat but as the story’s foundation: the “what if?” story. In a what-if narrative, the premise itself is built on a choice or moment that sends a character’s life spinning in an entirely different direction. Often to a different world.
While these types of narratives have always been a part of the landscape, lately they seem to be flourishing. Across novels, film, and television, audiences are drawn to tales of alternate histories, parallel universes, the multiverse, time travel, and other speculative structures that coalesce around the question of who we might have been if we had only did one thing differently.
Groundhog Day and Sliding Doors may be the most commonly referenced in this genre, but a sampling just from the past few years includes movies and TV shows like The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (based on a novel), Palm Springs, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Spider-man, My Old Ass, and Russian Doll; as well as novels such as The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig; Maybe Next Time, by Cesca Major; Wrong Place, Wrong Time, by Gillian McAllister; This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub; Cassandra in Reverse, by Holly Smale; The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio; The Astral Library, by Kate Quinn; and the world of novels from Rebecca Serle, including her March 2026 release, Once and Again.
In each of these tales, characters explore the path not taken by revisiting what they didn’t know would be a pivotal moment in their life, discovering another version of themselves in a different universe, or navigating an ever-changing reality. Whatever the speculative mechanism, they ask: What if I had chosen differently? In doing so, characters begin to confront who they are, who they were, and who they want to be.
We might call this phenomenon the Sliding Doors anxiety, the nagging awareness that our lives play out the way they do because of a single decision or a series of interrelated decisions. One small change could incite a ripple effect where everything is different. And maybe better.
Much like the surge in the popularity of romance and rom-com novels since the pandemic, these what-if tales benefit from the escapist element. And they are escapist—the notion of a parallel universe or time travel is inherently “other worldly.” But so is the pull of the “grass being greener.”
This is where I believe the attraction truly lies. These stories, while escapist in theory, are very much grounded in our own need to make sense of the lives we actually have. The “path not taken” resonates in our post-pandemic world, a world shaped by fear and uncertainty that led to often significant changes in geographic location, jobs and careers, schooling, family dynamics, and friendships. Time was lost, roads were abandoned, and lives were disrupted. Grief and loss affected millions. We’ve all come out of it with the realization of how fragile the structure of our world—globally and personally—truly is.
Instead of freeing us, and perhaps partially due to a political climate that has led some to rethink or even regret their civic choices, it seems to have only increased the mounting pressure we all put on our choices. And we make a lot of choices. One study claims that the average American makes 35,000 decisions every day (and if you’re a writer crafting a story, my guess is to double that).
If my 2025 Harper Collins novel Romantic Friction is a reflection of my years in the publishing industry, with my professional hopes and aspirations on nearly every page, my 2026 Harper release, Kiss, Marry, Kill, lays bare my personal life, encapsulating my private struggles over the past few post-pandemic years. This novel is about the power of choice and how much pressure we all feel, all the time, to make the “right” choice. As if this promotion or this degree or this partner or this Target throw pillow will solve our every problem and make our life complete.
I wrote this book in a season when I felt every choice I made was the wrong one—selling our home, navigating my parents’ health crises and my father’s ultimate passing, embarking on risky career moves, with all of it causing a strain in my marriage on top of some of my own chronic health challenges. When the ground beneath you not only shifts but cracks into craters, it’s all too easy to replay certain moments and ask yourself:
If only I had stayed…
If only I had done more…
If only I had said yes…
If only I had said no…
Regret and curiosity swirl together and one’s mind fixates: Am I being too hard on myself? Or not hard enough?
The invisible branches of the way my life could have played out haunted me. As a book club fiction author, I wanted to explore this very personal experience in what is my signature style of a relatable theme, a high-concept hook, and a dash of wit. The novel follows three best friends and cofounders of a health and wellness app who play a spin on the game of “kiss, marry, kill” at their summer outing and wake up the next day in an alternate universe where they’ve each done exactly that. It’s part twisty book club fiction, part female friendship, and part meditation on control, chance, and the stories we tell ourselves. It is about the path not taken and the many facets of love in our lives, ultimately asking: Do our choices define us or do we define our choices?
In real life, we only get one timeline. One set of consequences. One version of ourselves. But fiction lets us open the door to something else, to exploring an emotional truth in another world that can help us make sense of our own.
When I began drafting Kiss, Marry, Kill, I designed it so that each of the three main characters embodied a facet of choice. For one woman, everything is black and white, right and wrong, no shades of gray. For another, choices are all about what serves her best, consequences be damned. And the third is much like the person I was at the time, so afraid of making the wrong choice that you make none at all. The parallel universe they enter wasn’t meant to provide them with better lives. In fact, many of the consequences are messier and more complicated than the lives they left behind. Yet ultimately what the alternate world offers is clarity.
As a creative writing instructor and book coach, I often work with students and clients who also wish to process what they are going through in the pages of their novel. But novels aren’t memoirs and shouldn’t be treated as such. As writers of fiction, we need to channel our thoughts and feelings in a way that serves us as the author but, even more so, the reader. Today’s novels have high-concept premises, deeply resonating emotional and tangible stakes, and compelling storytelling.
In staying true to the reader as our audience (as was my goal in Kiss, Marry, Kill), authors can create a fictional experience informed by our own, but not dictated by it. My own regret and longing came to life in a storytelling structure I love and consume—this speculative “what if.” But it never lost sight of being first and foremost a fictional story meant to entertain but also to encourage readers to think.
By living out exaggerated versions of their choices, the characters in Kiss, Marry, Kill are forced to confront what they truly value: friendship, forgiveness, love. They begin to see that the meaning of their lives doesn’t come from perfect decision-making—it comes from the relationships and identities they build because of, thanks to, and in spite of those choices. In other words, the multiverse becomes a mirror.
This is why these alternate reality stories resonate with readers. They are a way of metabolizing uncertainty rather than escaping it. These stories aren’t necessarily about wishing we’d lived different lives but about learning how to live and thrive with the one our past decisions have given us.
When a character steps into another version of their life, the story gives us something we rarely get in reality: perspective. Ultimately, in writing this high-concept novel informed by my own questions and doubts, I was able to make peace with how much is truly out of our hands and how the pressure to make “perfect” choices can become its own trap. That’s the best we can hope for from fiction: appreciating the life we have by exploring what might have been.
Check out Lori Gold's Kiss Marry Kill here:
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