Plot Twist Story Prompts: Murphy’s Law

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, Unusual Transport, here.

For today's prompt, have anything that could go wrong actually go wrong. In other words, write with Murphy's Law in mind, which has been a thought process expressed by people since the mid-19th century that "anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

(3 Key Types of Stakes That Drive Novels.)

For instance, a character has to cross a bridge that crosses over a wild river. It's possible that while the character crosses the bridge that it collapses; so have it collapse. It's also possible that the wild river has hungry alligators or piranhas swimming around; so include those. And (fill-in-the-blank).

Murphy's Law creates conflict, and conflict drives story. So Murphy's Law can be a writer's best friend in a sense, especially if they have trouble increasing the stakes in their stories. Of course, it's not impossible for writers to take Murphy's Law to the extreme and turn a serious story into an over-the-top parody. But that's not always the worst thing either.

So give in to Murphy's Law, 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.

Click to continue.