Simon Rose takes over with Part Four. If you’ve missed his previous installments please visit:
If you don’t feel as if you can create your own story from scratch, why not use someone else’s? This is not an endorsement of plagiarism, but rather a suggestion to rewrite the ending to a story you’re very familiar with. This could be a fairy tale, a real incident from history, myths or legends, a movie or TV series, whatever you like really. Perhaps the prince never reached the castle to bestow a kiss on Sleeping Beauty and wake her from her spellbound slumber? Maybe Goldilocks met three tigers in the jungle instead of three bears in the woods? Perhaps the slipper didn’t fit Cinderella when she tried it on after all? What if Dorothy decided to stay in Oz instead of returning home to Kansas?
The genre of alternate history is a fascinating one, imagining history unfolding in a radically different way, resulting in utterly different timelines, landmark events and notable personalities. What if England had fallen to the Spanish Armada in 1588? Perhaps Napoleon wasn’t defeated at Waterloo? What if the Confederacy had won the U.S. Civil War? What would the world have been like if the Russian Revolution had never happened? Whatever road you decide to follow, attempting to rewrite the ending to a familiar story or present an alternative scenario could take you in all sorts of interesting directions. A radically different take on familiar characters and situations, while they may not be marketable in themselves, will help to get your creative juices flowing and perhaps serve as inspiration for your own piece of work.
Simon Rose is the author of The Alchemist’s Portrait, The Sorcerer’s Letterbox, The Clone Conspiracy, The Emerald Curse, The Heretic’s Tomb, The Doomsday Mask and The Time Camera, plus many non-fiction books for children. Visit his website at www.simon-rose.com or his blog at http://simon-rose.blogspot.com/
Thanks for writing Simon and thank YOU for reading,
Sarah Butland author of Sending You Sammy
