Plot Twist Story Prompts: Bad Guy Good
Plot twist story prompts aren’t meant for the beginning or the end of stories. Rather, they’re for forcing big and small turns in the anticipated trajectory of a story. This is to make it more interesting for the readers and writers alike.
Each week, I’ll provide a new prompt to help twist your story. Find last week’s prompt, Magical Object, here.
Plot Twist Story Prompts: Bad Guy Good
For today’s prompt, make the bad guy actually good (and I’m using “guy” in a non-gendered sense here). The baddie might seem bad throughout the story, but then is revealed to have been good all along. Or maybe the big bad guy actually did something undeniably bad, but for a good reason.
Whether we’re talking thrillers or romantic comedies, it’s fun as a reader to try and figure out who to trust and who to avoid. But for this twist to really work, you have to lean into the badness, for sure, while still leaving some wiggle room for a possible (if completely improbable) redemption.
Often, in life-and-death stakes stories, the bad guy will be revealed as good as they’re taking their last breaths or even after their own deaths. In romances, they could be the person who steps aside to allow the lovers to have their happily ever after (or maybe even a person who realizes their own HEA or the potential for one).
So make the bad guy actually good, and see what happens next.
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Have you hit a wall on your work-in-progress? Maybe you know where you want your characters to end up, but don’t know how to get them there. Or, the story feels a little stale but you still believe in it. Adding a plot twist might be just the solution.