Improve your writing in five minutes: mixing other stories to create a story.

If you are stuck for ideas for your new story, why not use this approach?

Take character(s) from one STORY and take character(s) from another STORY and use these to create a new STORY. This is a two-minute job.

For example, STORY 1= The Wizard of Oz and STORY 2= Sleeping Beauty. Using CHARACTERS= The Wicked Witch of the West and The Evil Queen.

What if each, in their quest for power, teamed up to become even more powerful. How would you create the story? How do they meet in the first place? Well, they need a reason to meet. 

Better to make your characters more human using modern-day ISSUES THAT AFFECT US such as loneliness, sadness, boredom etc

And how do you meet others? By going out to new places, events, clubs and so on.

Using these modern day issues give your NEW STORY a starting point. This is called momentum. At some stage their paths will have to cross.

Let's say each character had a hobby, and wanted to meet new people. Each ventures out into the community and joins a book club, which leads to coffee and a chat and eventually friendship.

What do they have in common? Do they have more in common than they thought? At this stage we MIX two characters together in their quest to become more powerful (THEME).

How does their friendship unfold? Does it work out? If it didn't/doesn't...why not? Were their efforts hindered by ISSUES THAT AFFECT US (such as administrative errors, resources issues, politics, greed in the workplace...)?

There...you have created a five minute STORY. You have created a five-minute skeleton plot: you have created a rough plot in five minutes--all you need to do now is flesh it out with detail. Then you write the NEW STORY. This is where the fun begins.


To recap: here is the formula,

STORY + STORY + CHARACTERS + ISSUES THAT AFFECT US + MIX + THEME = NEW STORY