How often have you read a book, watched a movie or played a video game and thought to yourself “You know, if I had written this, I’d have the story go another way”? I go through that a lot. Most stories follow well-established sets of tropes and conventions. But what makes a story idea “new” or “fresh” is the unique twists and changes they put on a story to make it different from what has come before. There are different ways you can do this, and each way creates fertile ground for new, groundbreaking story ideas that you can tap into.
Inverting Expectations
One of my favorite movies is the Drew Barrymore film “Ever After.” it follows a popular trend in movies where they take classic story and retell it with more modern sensibilities and attitudes. In this case it was a more assertive, independent and empowered Cinderella that didn’t need a fairy godmother or a magic pumpkin to get the attention of the prince.
It has been done countless times in comic books, like in DC Comics’ “Tales from the Dark Multiverse,” where things go horribly wrong during iconic events in the DC universe’s history, and those stories play out entirely differently from their original counterparts, with much darker outcomes.
To take this approach you can simply take a well-used story trope, study how that archetype usually progresses, and then ask yourself what would happen if you changed a few key details. There are lots of variations on the classic “hero’s journey” story type because of this. Imagine taking the story archetype used in “Dances with Wolves,” “Fern Gully” and “Avatar” and changing a key plot point so that the story goes in an entirely different direction.
Adding New Elements
The popular card game Magic: the Gathering has a history of taking popular stories and putting their spin on it. Whether it be Gothic horror with their Innistrad storyline, or Arthurian legends and Grimm Fairy tales with their Eldraine Storyline, or Japanese mythology with their Kamigawa storyline, they make a habit of taking well-known story tropes in pop culture and using them as the basis for creating something both new and familiar. You can do the same thing, by taking that story archetype, keeping the framework as-is, but adding some new elements to make the story unique. What would happen if you took that Dances with Wolves story type and added a live film crew that broadcast the whole saga like a reality show, with a live audience?
Making Fundamental Changes.
Quentin Tarantino’s film “Hateful 8” is, at its core, a chamber mystery. A bunch of unique characters are locked into a room with a mystery to solve, where possibly one of them is the culprit. It is a classic type of storytelling mastered by writers like Agatha Christie. Tarantino, however, puts two unique spins on the trope by first placing the story in the Wild West, and secondly by not having anything particularly mystery-worthy happen until more than halfway through the movie. The mystery until that point is figuring out why these disparate people were brought together in the first place.
For this approach, find a classic story archetype and try altering different aspects of it. Change the locale or the time period. Change the protagonist or the villain. And then see how those changes affect the story. We’ve seen that Dances With Wolves story in the wild west, in a Brazillian rainforest, and in outer space. What if you set the story in a circus? And had a drag queen as the protagonist instead of the typical male?
You don’t have to have a total blank slate when you are trying to come up with a new story to write. It is perfectly acceptable to take well-use story types and make changes to it to make the story your own. Give it a try and see what you come up with.
