Good stories center on the clashing of characters’ goals and motivations. Sometimes a character’s goals and motivations arise upon turning a new page in one’s life. Here are four writing prompts for stories that involve the goal of turning a new page.
Man vs. nature
The main character decides that to become the person he wants to be, he must accept some new challenge in a foreboding environment that he is unfamiliar with (say moving from sunny Southern California to the Arctic). What obstacles in nature threaten his ability to complete the new challenge?
Man vs. man
What if after a life-changing event two people – maybe father and son, mother and daughter, or husband and wife – must create a new destiny together but find themselves at odds with one another about how to do so? Why do they have different dreams? How do they find a future together?
Man vs. society
After a calamitous event in the main character’s life, he moves to another town where he plans to start a new chapter in his life by opening a running a business he’s always dreamed of. The local residents aren’t too keen on his new business or he coming to their town, though. How does he overcome the townsfolks’ cool reception to him and succeed at his new business?
Man vs. self
The main character has an addiction but know he needs overcome it or his world will fall part – perhaps lose his family, his career, his self-worth. How does he overcome this addiction – as well as the personal demons of the past that haunt him and lead to the addiction?
______________
My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.