What if?
2020 has been a rollercoaster of a year, and we’re sure we’re not the only ones wondering if we’ve slipped into an alternative timeline or parallel universe—or maybe wishing we had. “What if” sounds like the stuff of speculative fiction—what if Hitler had been killed before WWII even began? What if we had dragons? What if aliens have been trying to contact us all along? What if COVID-19 had been contained?—but really, “what if” is a natural way to imagine how the world around us affects our lives and the stories we tell.
This month we’re giving you the chance to explore the central themes of your stories by using the building blocks you already have, only from a new angle. Get ready for something completely different!
Ready?
November’s assignment is: retell your story set in an alternate universe (Maximum wordcount: 1,000)
The whys and hows:
Here’s a revelation for you (or it was for me): stories are more than just a series of events—that’s pretty much the definition of a diary entry. But the characters, motivations, and plot of your story don’t necessarily have to exist in a particular time and place. In fact, the more universal they are the better your story will hold up. Still, the setting of a story isn’t just window dressing. It affects the events that can occur, your characters, their reactions , and the options they have. So what happens if you take the heart of your story, the important stuff, and move it to an alternative universe?
First, let’s explain what we mean by “alternative universe,” or AU. Simply put, it’s transferring your story to another, maybe unexpected, setting. This doesn’t require pulling your characters out of 1930’s Harlem and throwing them onto a space station—but it could! It could also be something more subtle, like moving a break-up from her house to yours, or setting your poltergeist loose in a shopping mall instead of a haunted house.
Rewriting your story in an alternate universe gives you the chance to answer a question that comes up in writers’ groups all the time: without mentioning the plot or the characters, what’s your story about?
Examples
Hollywood loves a good AU retelling. Take, for example, the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, which is Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew set in an American high school in the 1990s. The movie takes the heart of Shakespeare’s play and examines it from a new angle, shedding light on modern teenage relationships (which have not, it turns out, changed a whole lot over the centuries—teenage angst is still teenage angst).
And I hate to break it to you but The Lion King is just Hamlet.
More, any series reboot is going to be an AU out of necessity. The timeline will change, which means the world around the characters changes. Ghostbusters 2016 asks what if we took all these things that happen in the ’80’s (four people with specific personalities bonding to stop a ghost apocalypse) and set them in the ’10’s? Oh, and also what if all the main characters were genderflipped? Is the central idea the same? Absolutely. You have your uptight super-nerd, the dippy receptionist, the disbelieving public, and… you get the point.
So the odds are that you’re already perfectly familiar with taking the same plot and characters, making a couple major changes to the worldbuilding, and dropping back in to write the story.
A few tips and tricks we learned on the way:
- Take a few minutes to go through the exercise of telling someone about your story without mentioning the plot or the characters. This will give you an idea of what events are important to keep going forward. That, in turn, will affect your world: don’t make one where those events can’t happen!
- For fiction: think about how the new setting affects the choices your characters have. By sending your Victorian heroine a thousand years into the future, what new options are available to her? Would she go along with that arranged marriage, or have social mores changed? If they have not, why not? If the arranged marriage is important to your story, what about your heroine could change to make that still a real complication in her life?
- For nonfiction: remember that personal essays are already only “mostly true.” Sometimes there’s a difference between what makes a good essay, and what really happened. We’re not suggesting that you change all the facts, but consider (for example) how moving a conversation from a public place to a private one (or vice versa) could strengthen the point of your essay. Alternately, take this chance to take a fork in the road and imagine what MIGHT have happened if you did. Then compare that to the real outcome. Which works out better? Any regrets?
- For any kind of story story: by changing the setting (and maybe the casting), what else changed? What stayed the same?
Need a second pair of eyes to see what you might have missed? Don’t be afraid to ask for help in the Coffeehouse!
Good luck!
Loading InLinkz ...Hindsight!
In case you missed it, here's a look back (see what we did there?) at the exercises in our 2020 workshop.
January: Write a story or essay in 1,000 words
February: Write the same piece in 100 words
March: Retain just 25 adjectives and adverbs from your original 1,000 word story
April: Write your story or essay using only dialogue
May: Write your story or essay from a different point of view
June: Write your story or essay in 2,000 words
July: Write your story or essay out of chronological order
August: Record your story or essay and transcribe it
September: Write your story or essay using a different voice
October: Write a poem using your story or essay as inspiration
November: Write a version of your story set in an alternate universe.
December: Write the final version of your story or essay in 1000 words.
About the author:
Christine Hanolsy is a (primarily) science fiction and fantasy writer who simply cannot resist a love story. She joined the YeahWrite team in 2014 as the microstory editor and stepped into the role of Editor-In-Chief in 2020. Christine was a 2015 BlogHer Voices of the Year award recipient and Community Keynote speaker for her YeahWrite essay, “Rights and Privileges.” Her short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies and periodicals and her creative nonfiction at Dead Housekeeping and in the Timberline Review. Outside of YeahWrite, Christine’s past roles have included Russian language scholar, composer, interpreter, and general cat herder. Find her online at christinehanolsy.com.
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
