Plot Twist Story Prompts: Helping Hand
Every good story needs a nice (or not so nice) turn or two to keep it interesting. This week, have a character offer a helping hand.
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, Dream Sequence, here.
Plot Twist Story Prompts: Helping Hand
For today's prompt, have a character offer a helping hand. The character offering the help could be a main character or secondary character. Also the offered help could be freely given or volunteered after a guilt trip. Plus, there's always the possibility the offered help is rejected by the person who may need it.
If the help is offered and accepted, then the plot could conceivably cut both ways. The person who receives the help could take advantage of the person offering it. For instance, helping someone with their groceries could turn into cleaning their entire house. In the end, the person who offered the help may come to regret being such "a nice person."
On the other end of the spectrum, the person receiving the help may come to regret letting someone else help. In one example, the helper may not do things the way the person receiving the help would prefer. In another example, the helper may start off helping with the groceries (example above) and then "helping" with everything else until it seems like they're upending the other person's life (for an extreme example, check out Stephen King's Misery).
Of course, the helping itself could be fine on both ends, but it could lead to a discovery or a new adventure. So have a character offer to help and see what happens next.
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
