Plot Twist Story Prompts: Evil Mentor

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, Blackmail, here.

For today's prompt, provide your story with an evil mentor. That is, a mentor who seems good, but who ends up being on the (at least seemingly) bad side of things. Of course, as with any of these plot twist prompts, you could do a double fake out and make the evil mentor eventually good.

(5 Tips for Writing About an Established Relationship.)

The evil mentor plot twist is so popular that I often find myself suspicious of any mentor in any story. In fact, the nicer the mentor the more suspicious I am, because it feels like so many stories make nice characters into bad characters nowadays. So play with the current state of storytelling and provide a few possible mentors for your characters and only make one of them bad. (Heck, I feel like this is basically done in every single Harry Potter book...multiple times!)

Keep in mind that your readers will be second guessing your mentors along the way. So consider carefully whether to make the mean mentor, the nice mentor, or the cool mentor evil. Because your readers will probably suspect them all. And maybe that's the real twist: Your evil mentor is actually only evil from "a certain point of view."

So have an evil mentor, 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.

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