Stories about the efforts of addicts and criminals to transform themselves are always fascinating, for they depict human beings rising out of a state of hopelessness and despair in an effort to regain control of their lives. Perhaps one of the following scenarios will get you started on this type of story.
SITUATION 1: Desperate to keep from falling off the wagon again (since he will lose his family, according to his wife’s ultimatum) an alcoholic takes unusual steps to maintain sobriety. His family worries that these extreme preventive measures do not justify the goal.
SITUATION 2: A prisoner experiences a vision of himself as a healer. He requests a job in the infirmary and studies nursing in his spare time. But because he has a difficult time controlling his temper, he keeps missing opportunities.
SITUATION 3: Although her addiction rehabilitation was successful, an engineer learns that her former employer refuses to rehire her, breaking his promise. Frustrated to the point of returning to the bottle, she turns to her closest friend, who suggests a better way to prove that she has overcome her addiction.
SITUATION 4: Determined to prove that her life of crime is behind her, an ex-convict tries to enter public service but is turned down everywhere she applies. As a last resort, she applies for a nurse’s aide job under a false identity—a parole violation.
SITUATION 5: To prevent a chronic kleptomaniac from sinking deeper into a life of crime, an imaginative therapist, having discovered the thief’s fascination with magic, helps him transform his talent for stealing into performing magic tricks.
SITUATION 6: Because of her emotional outbursts, a small-town mayor undergoes a psychiatric evaluation. One psychiatrist recommends that she abandon her political goals for something less stressful. Another psychiatrist, however, is convinced she can succeed in politics and helps her achieve that goal.
SITUATION 7: A much-admired professor struggles to keep his alcoholism from undermining his teaching, but he is gradually losing the battle ... until one of his students (the daughter of an alcoholic mother) comes to his aid.
SITUATION 8: After his wife accuses him of being oversexed, a devoted if passionate husband enters treatment for his addiction, but the treatment has the opposite effect. Now his wife wants him to find some middle ground. He complies but experiences unexpected complications when the boundaries of his marriage are tested.
SITUATION 9: A compulsive shopper is addicted to buying fashionable shoes even though she rarely wears them now that she lives on a farm. Her husband tries to help her break the habit, but he has a shopping addiction of his own—neckties, which he never wears.
SITUATION 10: Despite being warned by his fellow daredevils, a water skier cannot control his impulse to engage in dangerous activities like trying to set a speed record. The more urgently his wife discourages him, the more motivated he is to outdo himself. Then, after an accident that nearly kills him, he is transformed not only into a more safety-conscious athlete but a better one.
Some of the most inspiring stories are those about severely wounded or traumatized (including psychological trauma) people who not only survive but triumph over their disabilities. Even when doctors express little hope for leading a normal life following, say, paralysis, many patients find ways to overcome those limitations.
SITUATION 1: For a while it seems as if her near-total paralysis from a combat wound is irreversible, but her physician proceeds with an innovative spinal operation using microscopic neuro-technologies, despite other doctors insisting that it will not work.
SITUATION 2: Known for treating traumatized veterans with innovative methods, a therapist is asked to treat a vet with a severe case of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Treatment is risky because of the vet’s inclination toward sudden violence, but the therapist thinks she can handle the job.
SITUATION 3: After ending her marriage, a health-care professional vows never to marry again, no matter how wonderful a man she meets. She does meet such a man and sticks to her vow. But when she learns that he is suffering from a life-threatening illness, she reconsiders.
SITUATION 4: A professional tennis player struggles to regain her dexterity after a debilitating injury. Her physical therapist, though, loses his motivation to help her recover after she does not return his amorous advances. She begins to wonder if chasing after a comeback is really what she wants or if her unsuccessful romantic life is what she truly wishes to improve.
SITUATION 5: When his father is arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct, a college freshman loses all respect for him. Later he himself is arrested during a campus brawl—an experience that enables him to reevaluate his father.
SITUATION 6: Although confident that his chronic nightmares about combat have ended, a security guard experiences horrifying flashbacks. After he pursues a phantom intruder, his boss threatens to fire him—which greatly aggravates his mental state.
SITUATION 7: An army medic’s traumatic battlefield experiences are preventing her from living a normal life. When a therapist examines her, he realizes she is suffering from “moral injury”—an experience that deeply violated her sense of right and wrong. After much effort, he succeeds in partially (but not fully) transforming her self-hatred into forgiveness.
SITUATION 8: At first, a tennis player’s head wound debilitated her, but after getting back on her feet, she discovers that she can perform maneuvers once beyond her reach. These new skills, however, are undermined by several remaining physical deficits.
SITUATION 9: Because her ex-husband severely wounded her during a quarrel, the focal character has become fearful of men no matter how pleasant they are. Her therapist fails to help her. Surprisingly, her repentant ex is determined to win back her trust.
SITUATION 10: Nearly paralyzed by superstitious beliefs, an athlete works with a coach who once suffered from the same problem. Together they work toward transforming their team into champions ... superstition-free.
Every expert or professional was once a beginner or amateur, driven by a dream to succeed, no matter how difficult the uphill climb. We need more than mere pep talks to move us forward. Stories depicting realistic characters give us a better picture of what it takes to succeed.
SITUATION 1: An amateur tightrope walker dreams of performing breathtaking feats, but she limits herself to walking short distances and always uses a net. But when her boyfriend starts to lose interest in her, she pushes herself to do extremely dangerous stunts.
SITUATION 2: Dissatisfied with the way Santa Claus is portrayed during the holiday season, an unemployed actor is determined to depict Santa in a dazzling new way—but he can’t persuade anyone to give Santa a movie makeover until he meets a promoter who believes the actor can revitalize Santa Claus—and make lots of money in the process.
SITUATION 3: Although he loves playing the guitar and singing, a reclusive teenager cannot bring himself to perform for others, not even for his family. But when his sister overhears him perform in his room, she coaxes him out of his shell. Everyone is astounded by his talent—but the new social pressures threaten to undo him.
SITUATION 4: Despite the fact that her band teacher does not take her trombone lessons seriously (he insists “it’s not a girl’s instrument”) a high-school student is more determined than ever to become a great jazz trombonist.
SITUATION 5: Always entertaining guests with her magic tricks, a young woman wonders if her talents qualify her for the world of professional magic. She auditions but keeps getting turned down ... until she discovers that she can perform a kind of magic no one has ever seen before.
SITUATION 6: Overly enthusiastic about hang gliding and eager to prove that she could be as fine a glider as her male counterparts, a daredevil woman tries maneuvers she is not quite ready for and wipes out. After recovering, she is more eager than ever to succeed.
SITUATION 7: An aspiring playwright had always enjoyed creating skits for friends, but it wasn’t until college that a teacher encouraged him to become a screenwriter—and helped him produce a marketable script. But now he has become a pawn in Hollywood and wants out.
SITUATION 8: This mischievous kid loves her chemistry set—maybe too much. She dreams of transforming reality by mixing chemicals into exotic brews. Her parents encourage her and hope to direct her on a path to becoming a future Marie Curie, but her growing expertise takes her in the wrong direction.
SITUATION 9: A ventriloquist practices not only throwing her voice but her mind—and now she can enter the mind of anyone—or anything—she chooses. Her skill captivates large audiences, but one day she enters the mind of a chimpanzee and can’t get out.
SITUATION 10: When his “soul-brother” jazz pianist becomes incapacitated, a businessman with no musical inclination wakes up one morning inhabited by his brother’s psyche, and he is able to perform like him. Jubilant at first, the businessman eventually wants his old life back, dreary as it is.
We marvel at the way children transform into adults so rapidly—or it seems rapid in retrospect. Sometimes we need to look a little more closely at the transformation—a feat that can be accomplished through storytelling. The following situations should help you launch such stories.
SITUATION 1: Dissatisfied with his adult life, the protagonist wants to live in the imagined world of his childhood—a world in which he can levitate, frolic all day, and change into other creatures. He meets a sorceress who leads him to an alternate universe where those abilities are reality. However, he must become her mate for life and agree never to return to his old world.
SITUATION 2: A teenager’s efforts to become a full-fledged adult keep getting her into trouble. When she pays a shady character to forge a fake ID for her, she becomes entangled in his web of criminals and starts selling IDs to students. Soon she cannot find a way out.
SITUATION 3: Is it dementia that is causing a centenarian to engage in childish behavior, or is it simply the desire to be young and playful again? No one in the family seems worried ... until the old man decides to parachute from an airplane.
SITUATION 4: Years of military service did not “make a man” out of a troubled teenager whose father insisted it would. What it did do was teach him to be proficient with automatic weapons. His father is now concerned that the militia his son has joined will transform him into a dangerous extremist.
SITUATION 5: Infatuated to the point of wanting to marry his girlfriend, an eighteen-year-old rejects his parents’ view that he is ruled by hormones and lacks the maturity to make a lifelong commitment. This impulsive young man must learn the hard way.
SITUATION 6: “Stop obsessing over appearances,” a mother warns her daughter, arguing that people should be judged by their values and accomplishments. But the daughter calls her a hypocrite, pointing to her makeup and designer clothes. Once they both realize their immaturity, they work together toward reforming themselves.
SITUATION 7: Parents arrange a summer camp for their preadolescent children in which the boys and girls assume roles of men and women faced with adult issues like parenting and budgeting. At first, everyone thinks it’s just an amusing experiment in role reversal, but soon it becomes apparent that more is at stake.
SITUATION 8: A war is in its last stages, and both sides, desperate for soldiers, recruit and train children, transforming them into veritable killing machines. But it seems that this tactic only increases casualties.
SITUATION 9: In the near future, adults who want to be teenagers again can exchange psyches with teenagers who want to experience adulthood ahead of time. An adult volunteer, however, becomes trapped in her teenage host’s body.
SITUATION 10: After their parents injure each other in a fight, a brother and sister assume the role of parents. At first, the role reversal is productive, but then the brother and sister become even more abusive than their parents.
From Pinocchio to the Greek myth of Pygmalion, stories about puppets or statues or other inanimate (or semi-animate) objects enchant and delight us. Some of the following situations should spark your imagination enough to produce enchanting come-to-life stories of your own.
SITUATION 1: The dolls in this New Orleans doll museum are alive and eager to involve themselves in the lives of children who visit them—especially children who are unhappy. One such girl, abused at home, takes home a sorceress doll. The doll convinces her to get even with her parents and seek out people who care for her.
SITUATION 2: Nobody cares enough about these discarded, obsolete robots to adopt them, even as household servants, so they languish in a warehouse. But one of the robots persuades a maverick engineer to transform him (and his fellow abandoned bots) into living beings—or at least beings that appear to be alive.
SITUATION 3: A butterfly is disenchanted with her transformation and wants to embody the beauty she sees in a park’s statue. Unable to become such a figure depresses her, and her fellow butterflies try to persuade her that butterfly life is rewarding and full of its own beauty.
SITUATION 4: This modern-day Medusa turns boyfriends who hurt or disappoint her to stone. But one boyfriend has a few supernatural powers up his sleeve, too—provided he can use them before she uses hers.
SITUATION 5: On the surface she’s an ordinary child with an overactive imagination; at night, though, when everyone else is asleep, she transforms her stuffed animals into living creatures. She remembers to change them back before returning to bed ... except once.
SITUATION 6: An artist who paints portraits of persons he imagines or encounters in dreams discovers that he meets these people in real life soon thereafter. Even stranger, these persons feel bonded to him and turn to him for their needs.
SITUATION 7: When a biologist succeeds in transforming nonliving matter into a living organism, she tries to patent her method—and immediately triggers a public outcry. The harder she tries to convince the public that she is no Dr. Frankenstein, the more enthusiastically the public demands her arrest for endangering society.
SITUATION 8: Pygmalion with a twist: A sculptress falls in love with her statue of Bacchus, the god of wine and festivity. So intense is her love that the statue comes to life. But because Bacchus turns out to be a rogue and a rake, she is soon disenchanted with him, but he is not one to be dismissed so easily.
SITUATION 9: Little Joey, an orphan, has fun turning his monster toys into living creatures—and turning them back into toys before his guardians figure out what he’s doing. But one day, the toys refuse to return to their inanimate state.
SITUATION 10: What happens when a sorcerer loses his mind? In this case, he makes his appliances and furniture sentient, and they create plenty of mischief, including luring neighbors into the house and turning them into inanimate objects.
Winner or loser, or is that a false dichotomy? Investors make and lose fortunes, sometimes overnight. Outside the world of commerce, however, winning or losing becomes more complicated. What seems like a winning prospect turns out to be a losing one in the long run. Human nature tends to muddle the extremes—and for that reason, story possibilities abound.
SITUATION 1: Once hailed as Queen of the Ballerinas, a dancer loses her skill after suffering a stroke. A trainer works with her—but progress is discouragingly slow, and he worries that the dancer is falling rapidly into a pit of despair.
SITUATION 2: Having lost big at the tables, a compulsive gambler vows to quit forever ... after one more hour of play. In that hour she wins back her losses and walks away, determined to keep her promise, but because she’s a gambling addict, she suffers withdrawal and struggles to keep from gambling again.
SITUATION 3: Teased and bullied for being a lefty (especially for not being able to catch balls with right-handed mitts), a high-school student arranges a meeting with other lefties in the school and together they form a “Lefties are Hot” club. But the bullying only begins to stop when she uses her talents in the game to prove herself.
SITUATION 4: A millionaire invests nearly all of her fortune into an iffy enterprise, convinced it will flourish (and turn her into a billionaire). But the company tanks, and she becomes desperate to deal with her debts which drives her to even more drastic moves.
SITUATION 5: Although he was brought up to believe that aggressiveness is essential to business success, a junior executive starts losing clients and suspects that his aggressiveness is more of a liability than a benefit. He tries to transform himself, but his lifelong conditioning is hard to shrug off.
SITUATION 6: Upon taking a new brain-stimulating drug, a team of debaters rapidly advance to the top ranks. But as they prepare for the national championship, an adversary threatens to blow the whistle on their drug use unless he is paid a handsome sum.
SITUATION 7: This political youth organization is trapped by its lack of flexible, critical thinking: A person is either a winner or a loser, a friend or an enemy, and so on. An adult advisor strives to wean the teenagers off of dichotomous thinking, but their indignant parents call for his resignation.
SITUATION 8: Winning is losing when it comes to a compulsive spender winning the lottery. Her first impulse is to shop, shop, shop and invest in stocks that soon bottom out. Her husband searches frantically for a way to pay off a large debt they never had when they were poor.
SITUATION 9: A couple turns their ranch into a successful shelter for wounded, abused, or abandoned animals. There they recruit troubled young people to serve as caretakers for the animals. But the transformations do not occur overnight.
SITUATION 10: Despite her wild market speculations that result in spectacular wins ... and equally spectacular losses, a young and attractive real-estate mogul is more interested in maintaining her celebrity status than protecting her investments.
Immortality is one of those primal dreams of humankind—but, as some ancient myths remind us, the dream can turn into a nightmare as well. Living forever can be quite a challenge! Here are ten situations that can spark a story about the ambivalent experience of immortality.
SITUATION 1: A down-on-his-luck loner meets an exiled sorceress who promises to transform him into a being with supernatural powers, provided he’s willing to help her regain her station as the powerful sorceress she used to be.
SITUATION 2: After living a thousand years, a guardian angel no longer cares to be immortal; she still wants to help people, however—but as a mortal, with mortal shortcomings. However, after living as a mortal for a month, she longs to revert to her original angelic nature.
SITUATION 3: A modern-day Zeus, this CEO of a large corporation will transform any employee into an immortal being. The only catch is that he or she must agree to Zeus’s personal requests. For female employees, it means sharing in his sexual fantasies; for male employees, it means slavish devotion to ensuring the company’s prosperity.
SITUATION 4: The protagonist is an immortal spirit who has been reincarnating herself for ages, migrating from bird to bird (and before there were birds, from one flying creature to another), but now, after being told in a dream that she has only one life left to live, she must choose the form she will inhabit in her final incarnation.
SITUATION 5: Aphrodite, monitoring the romances she has set in motion, decides that she wants to experience love as a mortal among mortals and transfers her powers to her son Eros (Cupid) on the condition that he relinquish them when she returns. But Eros, relieved to be rid of his domineering mother, has no such intention.
SITUATION 6: Once upon a time, a magician transformed a servant girl into an immortal being, but after two centuries, being immortal did not fulfill her dreams. She wants to be mortal again. The only problem is that the magician has passed away.
SITUATION 7: A curious young woman wishes for immortality so she can learn all she can about nature and people. But after one of the gods grants her wish, she loses her ambition for learning and instead squanders her time.
SITUATION 8: When the moon goddess Artemis made love to Endymion in a dream, he was so enchanted by her that he begged Zeus (Artemis’s father) for immortality so they could love each other forever. As the Greek myth tells us, he gets his wish. What the myth doesn’t tell us is how Endymion felt about having to make love to Artemis for eternity.
SITUATION 9: A sorcerer working for an evil monarch has transformed the good monarch into a horse, which the evil monarch takes perverse pleasure in riding. Somehow the good monarch must find a way to communicate her plight and reverse the spell.
SITUATION 10: It is the twenty-third century, and human beings have an opportunity to become immortal by downloading their minds into android versions of themselves. There’s only one drawback: The android “hosts” are the property of the megacorporation that invented them.
We reserve the word monster for those who commit acts of brutality, as well as for creatures (supernatural or actual) as frightening in their appearance as they are in their behavior. No shortage of story possibilities exists for both categories of monster; here are ten of them.
SITUATION 1: A creature terrorizes villagers at night; during the day, he longs to be transformed into a regular, decent human being. Even the magicians who can perform such a transformation (for a fee) are afraid of him. But one magician stripped of his magic for bad deeds is willing to help him—if only he can get back his powers.
SITUATION 2: Every time this teenager experiences emotional distress he turns into a monster—but the physical changes are minimal, making it difficult for his potential victims to realize something is wrong until it’s too late. To make matters worse, the teenager remembers nothing during these periods.
SITUATION 3: With the onset of adulthood, a young woman experiences a transformation every full moon—but not into a werewolf. Instead she becomes an angel. As a churchgoing young woman, she is intrigued, until she receives her first orders from above. Her duties are not what she ever expected, and she begins to fear her transformations and question her faith.
SITUATION 4: The focal character exhibits strange reactions to ingesting certain foods: Her physical appearance or her temperament (sometimes both at once) will change. She has no way of knowing what she will turn into or how she’ll behave.
SITUATION 5: After secretly being taught to read by the son of a plantation owner, a slave steals a book on witchcraft from her master’s library and uses one of the incantations to transform herself into a werewolf.
SITUATION 6: He is ambitious, brilliant, and used to have numerous friends; but now his old friends avoid him because of his inexplicable, drastic changes from personable to vicious. After being arrested for assault, he is given a psychiatric evaluation, which exposes a startling secret.
SITUATION 7: This monstrous-looking person has a heart of gold, but no one believes it, despite his efforts. When his only friend gives up on getting people to look beneath the skin, he decides to become what everyone expects he is.
SITUATION 8: Like most kids, this one enjoys dressing up for Halloween, but unlike most kids, she becomes the creature she dresses up as. No, she doesn’t like dressing up as Bo Peep. Better give her what she asks for when she knocks on your door ...
SITUATION 9: Thanks to an evil magician’s spell, a monster assumes human form when it infiltrates a top-secret defense organization and wreaks havoc on a military base. When it is finally discovered, it reverts back to its monstrous shape to defend itself.
SITUATION 10: A bumbling magician, attempting to immunize a village against a deadly disease, uses the wrong incantation and transforms everyone into monsters, including himself. Only one villager escapes this transformation, and he must now determine how to get the monster-sorcerer to reverse the spell.
The boundaries between good and evil, saint and sinner, law enforcer and lawbreaker, are often blurry. The ambiguity stems in part from deep insights into human nature, as well as a fuller understanding of what causes people to shift from one extreme to the other.
SITUATION 1: One day he’s a feared badass; the next, he is a stunned churchgoer, having experienced a divine vision on a side street while planning to mug someone. Gang members who once respected him now taunt him. But he is convinced that God has called him.
SITUATION 2: A preacher is unable to keep himself from trying to seduce the women who have come to him for spiritual guidance. But after he guides a woman away from an abusive marriage, that woman guides him away from his sex addiction.
SITUATION 3: Upon being passed up for sainthood despite his long list of good deeds (and even the requisite number of miracles), a ghost who had been a controversial priest when alive is transformed (with the help of a demon) into a flesh-and-blood mortal for a day—just long enough for him to settle the score.
SITUATION 4: When an angel breaks the rules of angelic conduct, she is put on trial to determine whether her interactions with mortals were sinful or saintly. But the more closely her fellow angels examine her interventions, the tougher it becomes to decide where on the sinner-saint scale they fall.
SITUATION 5: Employees are baffled by their boss’s Scrooge-like transformation from miser to effusively generous altruist virtually overnight. Unable to leave well enough alone, one employee investigates and finds something unsavory behind the scenes.
SITUATION 6: To demonstrate his ability to withstand temptation, a self-proclaimed paragon of moral rigor visits a casino with his wife and proceeds to play craps, vowing to stop after five plays. But after winning five consecutive times, his resolve seems to have flagged.
SITUATION 7: After nearly killing an opponent in the ring, a fast-rising boxer is transformed from “killer slugger” to anti-boxing crusader. But then the boxer he nearly killed recovers fully and demands a rematch; when the champ refuses, the rival threatens to press charges for what he insists was an illegal fight.
SITUATION 8: No more Mr. Nice Dog: This family mutt has been treated like a dog despite his slavish obedience; now he will no longer tolerate sleeping outside on cold nights and eating bargain-basement dog food and being forced to do stupid tricks.
SITUATION 9: Once a thief and general hell-raiser, the protagonist is transformed by a vision of heaven on Earth, coupled with a voice calling him to lead his people to form a city of God. But as he strives to become a human saint, his enemies catch up with him.
SITUATION 10: A vagabond with a long criminal record saves a man’s life when the latter stumbles in front of a bus. This incident serves as a springboard for community service, but his past keeps interfering with his new opportunities.
Shape-changing has been a favorite theme with roots in ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology. Stories need not be supernatural, either: Given the right conditions, we all have the capacity to transform ourselves to some degree—saintly one moment, sinister the next. Here are ten scenarios to turn into stories about such primal transformations.
SITUATION 1: No one in the family could have guessed that their gentle cocker spaniel could change into a ferocious beast whenever he became angry at any family member or a neighbor. When the mother decides to euthanize the dog, the other family members do all they can to change her mind … and then the dog runs away.
SITUATION 2: Two siblings escape their abusive parents and hide in the woods. There they meet up with trolls, who teach them how to live in the wild. Soon a search party finds the siblings and they are forced to return to their parents; but the trolls come to their rescue.
SITUATION 3: Animal-rights activists rescue exotic birds that have lived much of their lives in cages and prepare to set them free in the wild. But the task is complicated because the birds must be prepared for self-sufficiency and must be returned to their original habitat ... where poachers (who sell them to pet stores) still abound.
SITUATION 4: Feral cats abound in this third-world country, and many are dying from starvation or disease. When a group of activists try to curb the practice of abandoning domestic cats by imposing stiff fines, they are threatened with violence.
SITUATION 5: Tired of being thought of as meek, a canary sets out to get some advice on ferocity from hawks, eagles, and other raptors. Once it transforms its behavior by adopting these new tactics, the canary longs to be its old self again but now has to live down a bad reputation.
SITUATION 6: A family attempts to re-domesticate an abandoned dog that had become feral. But no matter how patiently they care for the dog, it remains distrustful and keeps escaping. Finally, they work with an animal psychologist who takes an unorthodox approach.
SITUATION 7: Exasperated with the ultra-high-tech world she helped bring into being, a CEO abandons her company to live in the wilderness, vowing to have no further contact with civilization. Once she overcomes initial hurdles, she feels transformed, but then her brother locates her and tells her that her company is rapidly going under—and the extended family is dependent on it.
SITUATION 8: These special candies are not just irresistible to children; they cause children to mutate into monsters if they go too long without eating them. When several children go on a rampage after being denied these candies, scientists rush to determine an antidote.
SITUATION 9: Rescued from the wild where they lived most of their lives, twin brothers are socialized into everyday life, even to the point of becoming successful businessmen. Eventually, though, the call of the wilderness is too compelling, and the brothers return to their natural habitat—but long exposure to “civilized” life has taken its toll.
SITUATION 10: A strange disease is transforming young people into savages. Doctors scramble to isolate the virus and formulate a vaccine. But the virus keeps mutating—and each mutation results in greater savagery.