Weekly Prompt: Oh Damn! Now What?
This week our MICE Story Type is Event — Disaster Time!
Welcome to the fourth weekly challenge for November, where the theme is:
The aim this month is to help you try out the four different story types to learn how they work and see which ones you most like.
Oh Damn! Now What?
What that title should inspire in your mind is an event or an occurrence that disturbs the status quo.
The happy little village is no longer happy.
If you’ve seen the opening episode of the Wheel of Time, you know what I mean. A massive, traumatic event has upset their lives, changed their community forever, and they will spend the rest of the story trying to find a new balance.
A new normal.
Think of disaster movies. Anything with an earthquake, volcano or a flaming asteroid screaming toward Earth and only Bruce Willis, with backing vocals by Steven Tyler, can save us.
But an event can be small, and its effect large for that character.
John opened the letter and read the first line.
“Dear John, it’s over…”
The story is about that character trying to right their world
Your character has to deal with these externally driven conflicts, solving problems and dealing with consequences that all arise from this one event and their attempts to correct it.
Problems cascade, one thing goes wrong after another.
In Jurassic Park, the storm hits, but that’s not it, then the power goes out, then the dinos get out, then the raptors escape and so on…
These kinds of stories are the plot heavy roller coasters, where the audience grabs hold of something and grins along until the end.
Things go wrong and then things get worse
And trying to solve one problem leads to another. Focus on what the character is trying to solve, like a camera lens zooming into the unintended consequences caused by their attempts to fix things.
With try/fails start small and build up to bigger and bigger events and consequences. Stacking them and compounding the characters’ problems.
Consequences matter.
In the beginning they have a million options, in the end they only have one. And it’s a hard choice!
They have to outrun a raptor. Blow up the alien spaceship. Leap from a helicopter. Or sacrifice themselves.
In the end, it’s up to you.
Break their worlds and make them fight to get it back to normal.
Challenge Requirements
Your story must:
- Tells us a story about an event that wrecks their world and how they struggle to make it right again.
- Be min 100 and max 1000 words long, excluding the title, subtitle, and any post-story bio / links. (We use Medium’s own word count feature.)
- Be fictional, even if it includes factual information or concerns.
- Use “Event” as one of your five tags.
Example Story:
First published story for this prompt goes here.
