Every work of fiction depicts, in a sense, an alternate universe, another reality that could come to pass. Readers love entering different realities, not just because it’s fun to escape the reality we’re stuck in but because different realities offer new possibilities and fresh insights about the world we know. Use the following situations to help you develop an alternate-reality tale.
SITUATION 1: A Wall Street investment expert in October 1929 struggles to avert the stock market crash—and succeeds. His actions lead to a series of wild investments that never would have occurred otherwise. But another investment bubble looms later in the 1930s, leaving America woefully ill-prepared for the world events to follow.
SITUATION 2: On an alternate Earth, toxic air pollution leads scientists to genetically engineer people who are capable of living underwater. But because the sun is growing hotter and the oceans are drying up, more drastic survival measures as well as genetic alterations must be undertaken.
SITUATION 3: An expedition is sent to Mars—but this Mars exists in an alternate universe, one in which they find a breathable atmosphere on the surface. The narrator and crew find catacombs hinting at an ancient civilization, as well as another that may yet exist.
SITUATION 4: An alternate-Earth Leonardo da Vinci has successfully built a motorized flying machine. When a war breaks out, Leonardo struggles in vain to keep his invention out of the hands of the military.
SITUATION 5: The Walt Disney of this alternate Earth is a creative genius but is also unstable. In his Disneyland, he creates a machine that temporarily transforms visitors into his famous and lesser-known characters, some more ghoulish than anyone expects. One of the visitors avoids the transformation and seeks out the twisted Mr. Disney to get him to return the visitors to normal.
SITUATION 6: In this alternate Earth, a religion known as Disneyism is sweeping the country. Cartoon characters are the disciples who spread the gospel of childhood whimsy everywhere. But when the religion seems to be getting out of hand, a determined parent sets out to demolish the movement.
SITUATION 7: Columbus and his men in this alternate 1492 encounter Native Americans who possess supernatural powers and worship gods that discourage the European explorers from interfering with their culture.
SITUATION 8: An explorer finds an alternate Earth (the gateway to which he discovered by accident) that is dramatically unlike his own Earth and filled with possibilities for adventure. But then he encounters inhabitants that make him want to return to his own world as fast as possible.
SITUATION 9: In this alternate United States, Texas has seceded from the Union. Its citizens are not only permitted but are required to own and be trained to use high-capacity assault rifles. Despite internal conflict, the leadership decides that the only way to preserve their new nation is through expansion.
SITUATION 10: In this alternate Earth, humans are under the control of superintelligent, upright-walking dogs that are euthanizing humans because they are breeding out of control. After several failed attacks on the dogs, the humans attempt to negotiate a peace treaty.
Flying is in our genes. For ages we have longed to soar like the birds, and since the eighteenth century we’ve been able to in hot-air balloons—a feat romanticized by Jules Verne and others—but once the Wright brothers invented motorized flight, our hunger for flying adventures increased tenfold. Here are some flying scenarios to get your readers airborne.
SITUATION 1: A barnstormer in the early days of aviation is determined to win a woman’s affection by staging incredible aerial feats—until he suffers a debilitating accident.
SITUATION 2: A hang glider fantasizes about gliding across the Grand Canyon from North Rim to South Rim. The stunt would be suicidal, if not impossible, but he is obsessed with the idea.
SITUATION 3: The year is 2027, and an aviator attempts to replicate Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight—from plane to flight path (New York to Paris)—in an effort to call attention to Lindbergh’s less-than-popular political views; but the protagonist is determined to publicize the event for a less controversial reason—the need to rekindle the spirit of adventure that people seem to have lost by the centennial year of Lindbergh’s flight.
SITUATION 4: Hot-air balloonists embark on a journey across the Atlantic Ocean and encounter several life-threatening challenges along the way. Some are due to natural phenomena, but one is due to rivals who have planted an explosive device on the balloon.
SITUATION 5: Several jet-pack enthusiasts learn to enhance maneuverability to make possible a sport that can be played in midair. Problems arise when some players underestimate the power of their jet packs.
SITUATION 6: A woman aviator in the 1920s embarks on a series of adventures across the country. A male aviator, feeling upstaged by her achievements, tries to discredit her. He even tinkers with her plane.
SITUATION 7: A passenger jet gets hijacked by the copilot, who orders the pilot to divert the plane to an enemy country. The copilot is aware that an air marshal is aboard and tricks him into surrendering his weapon. However, an assistant air marshal (in training) is also aboard.
SITUATION 8: Black Hawk pilots plan an attack against a terrorist cell in the midst of a civilian neighborhood. One of the pilots (the narrator) refuses to carry out the mission unless certain security measures to protect the civilians are carried out—even if it means putting the pilots’ own lives at greater risk.
SITUATION 9: During an air show, one of the fighter pilots sees the event as an opportunity to avenge a rival for what he considers to be a terrible injustice. Unfortunately the avenger’s plan backfires, causing him to be injured, which in turn leads the rival to rethink his own actions.
SITUATION 10: Massive power blackouts due to off-the-chart solar flares cause air-traffic controls at major airports to go haywire. It takes a combination of savvy pilots and air-traffic controllers to figure out ways to avert disasters.
People on the run, people protesting injustice, people at the end of their collective ropes: Such people set the stage for exciting reading, and authors like William Bligh (Mutiny on the Bounty) and Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny) have capitalized upon them. World history is filled with examples of heroic resistance against oppressors. The following scenarios should pique your storytelling imagination.
SITUATION 1: A long-suffering laborer leads other workers in a massive strike in sweatshops in her city. But the sweatshop managers retaliate. Not to be deterred, the protagonist (the most experienced of the employees) finds a unique way to convey her fellow workers’ needs to the owners and public.
SITUATION 2: In the Deep South, the narrator (a runaway slave) escapes. Just as he is about to walk into a trap, he is assisted in his escape by a plantation owner’s son, whose life was once saved by the runaway.
SITUATION 3: Individual teens who have run away from home struggle to create an organization devoted to teaching parenting skills to those about to have children—but their parents, having uncovered clues to their whereabouts, take steps to ensure that they return to their homes instead.
SITUATION 4: A defector from a totalitarian country is given asylum in the United States, but he is actually a spy who plans to sabotage a secret NASA mission. During the mission, however, he has second thoughts.
SITUATION 5: An army deserter about to be executed is given another chance to prove his bravery after convincing his superiors that he knows where an ambush has been set up. The odds of neutralizing the ambush are nil because of high-tech booby traps.
SITUATION 6: Despite being decorated for valor, a soldier deserts his platoon during a raid when his fellow soldiers open fire on civilians whom the enemy combatants have infiltrated. He has a change of heart when he learns that one of his closest buddies in the platoon has been killed.
SITUATION 7: Several of the crew aboard a naval vessel fear that their captain is collaborating with an enemy nation. A female officer thinks she can foil the captain’s plans.
SITUATION 8: After receiving intensive training in the use of top-secret military equipment, a soldier defects to an enemy country. A special agent is assigned to intercept him before he has a chance to share his training with the enemy.
SITUATION 9: The most courageous of King Arthur’s knights deserts the Round Table and disappears. Arthur recruits one of the other knights to find him and bring him to justice—but it turns out that the deserting knight has disguised himself as a servant to uncover a plot to overthrow the monarchy.
SITUATION 10: Pirates attack a cargo ship carrying ancient artifacts, which they seize. But when two of the pirates are killed as they try to escape, the lead pirate wants to avenge their deaths by destroying the cargo ship.
Take your readers on a thrill ride chasing ghosts of one kind or another—or maybe it’s the ghost that is doing the chasing. Readers young and old never tire of an exciting and creepy ghost story, such as Peter Straub’s Ghost Story or Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. The following situations should pique your creative imagination.
SITUATION 1: The protagonist has a talent for locating rogue ghosts (a talent she discovered as a child during a haunting) but is deathly afraid of ghosts. Her boyfriend helps her to overcome this fear in order to trap an especially dangerous ghost.
SITUATION 2: After years of hunting down mischievous ghosts, the ghost hunter decides to take on one final, dangerous assignment—but the ghost threatens to outsmart him. However, the old ghost hunter has one last trick up his sleeve.
SITUATION 3: A ghost hunted by a nobleman turns out to be the nobleman’s lover who died in a house fire set by a jealous rival. The nobleman feels obligated to persuade the ghost not to avenge the rival even though they both want the rival to suffer.
SITUATION 4: A ghost hunter fully understands, and is sympathetic to, the misery of being a ghost. She uses her insight to assuage a rogue ghost, but the ghost makes some startling demands that she cannot imagine being able to fulfill.
SITUATION 5: Several ghosts compete to see who can frighten people most effectively. They have a great time until they encounter individuals who have learned a thing or two about how to frighten ghosts.
SITUATION 6: Several ghosts wreak havoc in a college residence hall or sorority/fraternity house. However, when the students are about to be evicted for gross misconduct, the ghosts offer a truce ... of sorts.
SITUATION 7: An altruistic ghost tries to help a thief see the error of his ways, but the thief doesn’t take the ghost seriously—until the ghost demonstrates its remarkable generosity.
SITUATION 8: A ghost offers to trade its supernatural powers with a living person for the opportunity to inhabit that person’s body for a year. The person agrees; but after the year is over, the ghost does not want to depart.
SITUATION 9: Infant ghosts haunt a nursery, causing mayhem when they make the infants do things infants are normally not capable of doing. A medium with experience in dealing with infant ghosts intervenes, but she only makes things worse.
SITUATION 10: The ghosts of a Nevada ghost town plan a few surprises for a film crew that’s shooting a Western there. Result: an adventure between the actors playing the town’s 1880s-era inhabitants and the actual ghosts who lived there and know things the actors do not.
Magic exists on many levels in storytelling: There is the magic of magicians, the magic that permeates fantasy worlds, and the magic that emerges from the dark corners of the real world. Think of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and, of course, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. The following ten story situations will give you a chance to make magic real.
SITUATION 1: In this new Alice in Wonderland adventure, the Cheshire Cat leads Alice into an unexplored part of Wonderland where she must hold her own against malicious dwarves and carnivorous caterpillars.
SITUATION 2: Using her ESP powers, a child is able to detect portals to magical realms. She is afraid to enter them until her brother, who secretly follows her one day, persuades her to enter with him. Alas, they cannot find their way back.
SITUATION 3: A hypnotist takes the narrator on a wild adventure through dream space, where dream and reality begin to blur for her. To make matters worse, the hypnotist is unable to awake the narrator; as a result she must find a way to navigate back to reality on her own.
SITUATION 4: In an impoverished village, a child is possessed of subtle magical powers that enable the villagers to withstand disease and starvation. One of the adults, witnessing the child’s magic, tries to get the child to use her magic for more avaricious ends.
SITUATION 5: Orpheus descends to the realm of Hades to rescue his beloved Eurydice from death, but while he’s down there, he is distracted from his task by dead souls and monsters, whom he manages to enchant with his singing ... with one exception: Hades himself.
SITUATION 6: Apollo pursues Cassandra; she will let him make love to her only if he grants her the gift of prophecy, which he does. When she doesn’t keep her end of the bargain, he sees to it that her prophecies are never believed. But Cassandra manages to get Apollo to reverse his decision after she stops an invading army from destroying his shrines.
SITUATION 7: Angels appear to mortals and imbue a chosen few (regardless of faith) with magical powers in order to bring peace to a land constantly at war. Things become complicated when one of the angels falls in love with a mortal and is captured by one of the warring parties.
SITUATION 8: The narrator, an exiled king, recruits a magician of unknown reputation to help him restore fertility to the fields of his kingdom, which a sorcerer had rendered sterile. His plan is to retake his throne after the magician replenishes the land—but the magician has a different agenda.
SITUATION 9: This adventure story is set in the Garden of Eden before all that business with the apple. Satan schemes to lure Adam and Eve out of the garden using the seven deadly sins to entice them, with the apple being the final temptation.
SITUATION 10: A sweet old lady rescues a brother and sister from an abusive home by transporting them to a magic land where she is a sorceress ... who also happens to be running from the king’s army. It becomes the siblings’ turn to help the woman.
The more rigorous and risky the adventure, the more exciting your story will be. Use one or more of the following scenarios to spin a white-knuckle adventure on the open sea (like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi), on mountains (Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air), or in the bowels of the earth (Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth).
SITUATION 1: A paraplegic climber trains to scale a mountain never before scaled by disabled climbers. Her biggest obstacle is her own self-doubt, which her boyfriend and sister struggle to help her overcome.
SITUATION 2: After two women become trapped while climbing a treacherous mountain, two male rescuers themselves become trapped, and the women not only extricate themselves but also save the male rescuers.
SITUATION 3: In a prequel to Moby-Dick, Ahab embarks on the whaling adventure that results in the loss of his leg. [For backstory clues, see Moby-Dick, Chapters 28 and 36.]
SITUATION 4: While on a deep-sea fishing trip, fishermen are sucked into a vortex. They emerge in an alternate world filled with strange sea creatures, one of which seems intelligent enough to help them return to their world.
SITUATION 5: A group of classical-literature lovers embark on a voyage that retraces Odysseus’s journey from Troy to Ithaca. To their astonishment they encounter some of the mythological beings that appeared in The Odyssey. The narrator, a Homer scholar, must figure out how to evade their traps.
SITUATION 6: Interplanetary explorers discover an underground city while exploring a cave on one of Saturn’s moons. It appears that the city was founded by interstellar travelers eons ago.
SITUATION 7: When explorers enter a sealed cavern chamber, they discover several caskets containing people in suspended animation—or are they vampires? Should they try to revive them?
SITUATION 8: Divers discover an ancient ship containing artifacts that do not seem to belong to any known ancient culture. It is up to the narrator—an offbeat archaeologist—to determine the nature and origin of these artifacts.
SITUATION 9: Anthropologists exploring a cave on a remote island discover the remains of an unknown species of hominid. While researching the site, they come to realize that this humanoid species is extinct.
SITUATION 10: Pilgrims climbing a sacred mountain in a fantasy land come face-to-face with the gods they’ve sought—but the gods are more mischievous than benevolent: They like to make the climbers do things against their will.
All of us carry some rebelliousness in our blood and have brought it to the surface on occasion since early childhood. Characters like Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights or Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye are examples. It stands to reason, then, that readers will identify with the heroes or antiheroes in the following situations.
SITUATION 1: An ex-convict breaks his restrictive parole to achieve spiritual wholeness on a pilgrimage. He discovers that his faith isn’t as strong as he hoped, but when faced with imminent arrest, he must choose between giving up peacefully or committing further parole violations to help a young idealistic pilgrim on a similar quest.
SITUATION 2: Mental patients escape from a state hospital and embark on a religious quest in a nearby seaside community. But just as they establish a following with local inhabitants, hospital officials try to round them up.
SITUATION 3: In the late nineteenth century, a riverboat captain tries to outsmart a group of thieves who board the vessel and intend to rob the passengers. However, the thieves (veteran lockpickers, pickpockets and card sharks), prove to be more clever than the crew expected.
SITUATION 4: Rebel circus clowns, mistreated by the manager, take over the circus and stage shows never enacted in a circus before. Things get complicated when one of the clowns goes on a rampage and tries to murder the manager.
SITUATION 5: Two college dropouts embark on a train-hopping journey across America to realize their spiritual connection with the land. Their idealism is constantly challenged, however, by the riffraff they encounter.
SITUATION 6: A teenager with three personalities literally splits into three separate persons as a result of a potion or incantation. They go their own ways, and the most rational of the trio attempts to reintegrate the other two (realizing he cannot exist without them), but they prove to be more elusive than anticipated.
SITUATION 7: The court jester of a king secretly hypnotizes the king to be the court jester while he himself assumes the king’s identity. Everyone is fooled because the jester, being the king’s illegitimate son, resembles his father. When the Queen discovers what has happened, she takes drastic measures to restore normalcy.
SITUATION 8: A homeless eccentric wins a Powerball jackpot of half a billion dollars and uses the money to embark on a worldwide crusade to turn some of his dark fantasies, like gladiatorial combat, into reality.
SITUATION 9: During WWII, an American POW manages to convince one of his captors to launch an attack against their own army. The captor has a change of heart and to demonstrate his loyalty, threatens to execute the POW, unless the POW conducts a covert operation against the Americans.
SITUATION 10: Guardians of an evil king secretly plot with spies dispatched by a good king to cast a spell on the evil king’s army. The spell shifts loyalties to the good king at first, but the trance wears off prematurely.
A favorite motif in science fiction, shape changing is actually part of the real world: We change shapes when we embark on weight-loss regimens or don costumes for Halloween or wear prosthetics when we act in plays. Consider developing any of the following shape-changing situations into a serious or amusing tale.
SITUATION 1: The narrator has been abused by one man too many in her life. Now that she has mastered the art of shape-shifting, she avenges these abuses in unorthodox ways.
SITUATION 2: A werewolf’s transformation back into human form goes awry: He only partially changes, leaving him half man and half wolf and exhibiting both behavioral and physical manifestations of both.
SITUATION 3: A secret agent kidnaps a key operative in a drug-smuggling ring and then assumes the operative’s appearance. But the others suspect the operative of being an informant and plan to kill her.
SITUATION 4: Zeus embarks on a romantic romp to seduce as many women as he can by changing himself into innocuous creatures—but one of the women learns of Zeus’s schemes from another god, and she sets a trap.
SITUATION 5: Extraterrestrials change themselves into political and military leaders in order to infiltrate strategic sites. When the plan is set, they launch a coordinated invasion of the earth. The protagonist, one of the few humans whom the ETs think they have brainwashed into assisting them, tries to stop the invasion in its tracks.
SITUATION 6: Fallen angels sneak back into Heaven by disguising themselves as benevolent angels—and once back inside the Pearly Gates, they incite all kinds of mischief until one of the genuine angels works out a plan to drive them out.
SITUATION 7: A woman loses a drastic amount of weight (real-world shape changing) and finds that it does not bring her happiness, so she attempts to lose even more weight. Before her health is irretrievably damaged, a close friend finally makes her see the folly of her behavior.
SITUATION 8: Several shape-shifters embark on an adventure of mischief and mayhem during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. But the shape-changing revelry goes awry when one of the masquerading “normal” people seeks revenge.
SITUATION 9: A cuckolded husband (who is also a shape changer), assumes the shape of his wife’s secret lover and gets back at his wife in frightening ways. When she figures out what he’s up to, she engages in some shape-changing surprises of her own.
SITUATION 10: A group of shape changers attempt to influence federal legislation. Despite careful planning, however, their plot falls apart when they kidnap key senators, assume their shapes, and try taking over the Senate.
Time travel is the quintessential science-fiction/fantasy adventure (typified by H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, given a fresh approach by Audrey Niffenegger in The Time Traveler’s Wife). It satisfies our desire to escape the prison house of now, to change the past awful events, and to peek at things to come. The following situations should help you develop time-travel adventures of your own.
SITUATION 1: A physician travels to 1889 Austria and attempts to prevent Hitler’s mother from meeting his father, thereby preventing Hitler from being born. However, this only reshuffles the deck of potential Nazi leaders. Undaunted, the physician tries again, this time targeting the mothers of Goebbels, Goring, and Himmler, but each attempt leads to the same tragic events Finally he tries a simpler tactic: ensuring that one of the assassination attempts on Hitler succeeds.
SITUATION 2: Time travelers journey to the future to obtain secrets about how to keep the human race from destroying itself. When they return to their own times with their insights, nobody believes their solutions can work. On the contrary, they’re convinced the time travelers’ solutions could change humankind in disturbing ways.
SITUATION 3: Two bibliophiles travel back to ancient Alexandria (fifth century C.E.) determined to prevent the Great Library from being destroyed. In the process they become entangled in the uprising between Christians and Pagans.
SITUATION 4: A time traveler jumps fifteen years into the future and encounters himself in a wretched state. He asks his future self to explain what had happened to him and then returns to the present to prevent those events from occurring. However, things do not work out as planned.
SITUATION 5: A governor, desperate to find a way to reverse the bad political decisions that led to her downfall, travels back in time to change key decisions. Although these changes will lead to improvements, they will also be the cause of new problems.
SITUATION 6: A time-traveling teenager winds up in the twenty-third century, when virtual reality has overtaken physical reality. In trying to escape one nightmare scenario after another, she keeps confusing one reality with the other.
SITUATION 7: A time traveler decides to live her life over, starting at age seventeen, when she became infatuated with a man who steered her in the wrong direction. Seeking revenge, she re-encounters the man, but she is swept up by his charm all over again—until he does something that snaps her out of it.
SITUATION 8: An orphan travels back in time to rescue his parents from the accident that took their lives. But as a result of his interference with the timeline, his life becomes more troubled than before. He must now choose between being an orphan or keeping his parents and having a more difficult life. Or perhaps there is a third alternative ...
SITUATION 9: Traveling to late-sixteenth-century England, a playwright befriends Shakespeare. The friendship results in the two of them collaborating on a play whose reception has far-reaching consequences.
SITUATION 10: A small cruising vessel in the Mediterranean is swept off course by a bizarre weather system and winds up in ancient Greece. After overcoming suspicions that they are invaders, the passengers gradually become part of Athenian culture during its Golden Age.
Treasure: The very word stirs our spirit of adventure. We all dream of finding a gold nugget, a precious artifact from a vanished civilization. Literature is filled with treasure-seeking adventures, from Treasure Island to The Da Vinci Code. Such finds can have a life-changing influence on individuals and can even change history. Here are ten treasure-hunting adventures for you to spin stories from.
SITUATION 1: A homeless man learns prospecting secrets from an old friend, and he decides to test them out in an abandoned gold-prospecting site in the Sierra foothills. He meets up with unsavory prospectors who try to force his secrets from him.
SITUATION 2: Two prospectors, once close friends, become bitter rivals. When one of them discovers a silver lode in an abandoned Nevada mine, the other tries to sabotage the mine.
SITUATION 3: An archaeologist uncovers the remnants of a Paleo-Indian culture—but local Native Americans on whose land the archaeologist was digging refuse to allow the skeletons discovered there to be examined scientifically.
SITUATION 4: A group of wildlife preservationists, motivated by a large reward, set out to prevent ivory poachers from attacking elephants. To have any chance of succeeding, they must lure the poachers away from the elephants and toward an even greater treasure source: rhino horns—but these rhino horns are fake.
SITUATION 5: After a long-lost painting is discovered in a warehouse used for hiding valuables during World War II, art thieves steal it. After tracking down the thieves, the discoverers make an even more valuable discovery.
SITUATION 6: Divers try to salvage treasure from a cargo ship that sank more than a hundred years ago. However, one of them gets trapped inside, and the narrator struggles to save his life before the sunken ship slips into a deep trench beside it.
SITUATION 7: Astronauts fifty years in the future attempt to drill through the ice crust on Jupiter’s moon Europa and reach the underlying ocean. Preliminary evidence suggests that a treasure trove of exotic organisms awaits their discovery—although some of them might be deadly. The challenge is to break through before Jupiter’s potentially lethal radiation prevents the astronauts from completing the mission.
SITUATION 8: A group of adventurers dares to rescue precious artifacts from an ancient village facing imminent destruction from a volcano about to erupt, while also avoiding others seeking their own fortunes in the abandoned village.
SITUATION 9: A billionaire offers a $100 million reward to anyone able to infiltrate and destroy a gang of militants who wiped out the billionaire’s family decades earlier.
SITUATION 10: Archaeologists have a vague idea where treasure from an ancient Mediterranean culture is buried, but they must outwit pirates who know for certain where the treasure is but do not know how to retrieve it.