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What If: The Two Most Powerful Words in a Writer’s Repertoire
Almost all writers are familiar with the power of the “what if” question. Every novel, story, and article is inspired by those words, even when the question isn’t articulated. Many of us, however (myself included up until a few years ago) fail to tap the question’s full potential. Why? Simply because we don’t make a conscious effort to answer it.
My historical novel Behold the Dawn, a medieval epic set during the Third Crusade, was, in many ways, a changing point in my writing process—not in small part because it was in outlining this story that I learned to deliberately answer those magic words: What if?How I Discovered the “What If?” Question
On the first page of Behold’s notebook, I scribbled down a rough synopsis, a compilation of the hodge-podge ideas that had been germinating for several years.
At the top of the next page, I wrote What if…?, and, below it, I dashed off every single question that popped to mind.
When I started Behold, I had already written five novels and published one. But it wasn’t until I began preliminary sketches for this new story that I started developing the detailed process I now use, crystallizing what I had learned from outside sources and my own experiences, and solidifying the methods I knew worked for me.
One of those methods is taking a moment, at the very beginning of a story, to deliberately ask myself, “What if?”
Let the “What If?” Question Open the Floodgates of Your Creativity
Most of my ideas were completely off base, some of them laughably so, and most never made it into the book. But they opened the floodgates of my imagination and prompted me to think about my story in ways I hadn’t previously considered. By allowing myself to write down every idea, no matter how crazy, I came up with gems I would never have thought of otherwise—most notably the question, “What if an assassin was hired to kill himself?”
Underneath my list of questions (which I continued to add to throughout the notebook, whenever something new popped to mind), I tried another variation of the what-if question, by asking What is expected? I made a list of everything I could conceive the average reader of expecting to happen in my story—and then turned each expectation on its head to insert the unexpected wherever possible.
These simple exercises bore fruit beyond my wildest hopes. In the space of a handful of notebook pages, my story leapt from a simple tale of vengeance and redemption and love in the Middle Ages, to a complicated story of intrigue and suspense.
How to Put the “What If?” Question to Work in Your Story
Even if your preferred methods don’t include outlining (intensive or otherwise), make the what-if question a part of your routine for every story.
Write (or type) the question out to provide yourself a solid visual, and respond in whatever medium allows you the most mental flexibility. I write longhand because the sloppiness of my handwriting frees me from the need for perfection and allows me to throw any and all ideas onto the page.
But the speed and ease of typing or even verbalizing into a recorder might work best for you. The point is to actually record your thoughts, so that you can look back over them and gain new insight.
Once you’ve selected the few ideas that might work, start looking for tangents: “If such and such happened, then what if this also happened? Or what if this happened instead?”
The possibilities are endless—and infinitely reward
