MASTER LISTS FOR WRITERS: Thesauruses, Plots, Character Traits, Names, and More (6 page)

50 HIGH-STAKES PLOTS

For suspense, thriller, mystery, and action-adventure stories, you want intense, life-or-death plots. Many other genres, such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, romantic suspense, and paranormal romance, often employ these kinds of story lines as well.

Remember that although we usually think of the heroes as the ones staying within the boundaries of the law and the villains as the ones operating outside it, that’s not always the case. And of course, almost every villain is the hero in his own mind. Some of these stories may overlap a little in your next exciting project!

1. Someone wants to destroy the country, planet, or neighborhood and must be stopped.
   
2. Someone close to the heroine mysteriously disappears.
   
3. The protagonist, someone he loves, or a team member is kidnapped or taken prisoner and must be recovered.
   
4. Someone is trying to murder the hero or someone he loves, and he doesn’t know why. He might or might not know who it is.
   
5. Someone is trying to murder the heroine or someone she loves, and she knows exactly why. Maybe the would-be killer has an old grudge, or maybe our heroine has secret information.
   
6. There’s a serial killer on the loose who must be stopped. It could be a person or a monster.
   
7. A friend or family member has been brainwashed or possessed and has turned into a killer.
   
8. The heroine, or a group, is escaping prison, slavery, or another kind of oppression.
   

1. Investigating a loved one’s murder leads our hero to a foreign country or into a dangerous underworld.
   
2. People in a house or building have been taken hostage.
   
3. A person who has only imagined or played at being a warrior or hero now finds himself in a real battle or a game with big stakes.
   
4. Someone is lost or stranded in an enemy environment, a harsh wilderness, or some other place where survival is a challenge.
   
5. A natural or human-made disaster threatens to wipe out our heroine along with everyone else.
   
6. Someone is resolved to get revenge against the one who ruined his life or the life of a loved one—or at least bring the villain to justice.
   
7. Our hero is sure someone has been wrongfully accused or convicted of a crime and searches for the real culprit.
   
8. A community asks a stranger to help save them from outlaws, a dragon, or an alien invasion.
   
9. The hero is on the run from the law. He may be guilty or he may have been framed.
   
10. Someone must find, retrieve, or get rid of a magical, cursed, or dangerous object.
    
11. An ordinary person learns she has special powers that she must quickly learn how to control.
    

1. The hero has special powers or secret knowledge he must hide, or else risk getting killed.
   
2. Someone is stealing something significant, such as a priceless painting or a huge amount of money.
   
3. Someone wound up in the possession of something valuable, dangerous, or important, which leads to trouble.
   
4. Rivals, enemies, or just seemingly incompatible people join together to take down a bad guy or rescue a mutual friend.
   
5. A hero is unwillingly turned into a threat—a bomb gets surgically planted in him, he is turned into a zombie, or he’s carrying a deadly virus.
   
6. A criminal is recruited by the good guys so he can bring his unique knowledge or skills to an assignment or case.
   
7. A team is on a dangerous mission, but a personal conflict between two or more members poses the largest threat.
   
8. Lovers, brothers, or friends are pitted against one another, and only one of them can survive.
   
9. Through technology or magical means, someone’s identity is wiped out or assumed by another person.
   
10. A spy, soldier, or assassin decides to help his target instead.
    
11. A spy or soldier falls in love with the enemy—but remains loyal to her duties.
    

1. A damaging secret letter or video is made public, and the heroine must deal with the aftermath.
   
2. A voyeur or fan becomes obsessed, with shocking consequences.
   
3. A person must travel to a certain point by a certain time—maybe with a prisoner or a treasure in tow—or there will be dire consequences.
   
4. A human-made creature becomes a deadly threat.
   
5. A plane, ship, bus, or train crashes or seems likely to crash.
   
6. Someone turns on his own organization once he discovers that they are actually evil.
   
7. Through training and determination, an unskilled person becomes an effective soldier, spy, or hero.
   
8. Someone with a violent past, or someone retiring from a dangerous career, gets pulled back into the fray again.
   
9. A person in the wrong place at the wrong time becomes an accessory or a witness to a terrible crime.
   
10. Someone appears to have killed herself, but our heroine is positive it was actually a murder.
    
11. A small group of people defend themselves against an attack by a much bigger or more powerful force.
    
12. Hundreds or millions of people are under attack by a small group, possibly via computer viruses or biological weapons.
    

1. A conspiracy theorist or psychic predicts something awful, but can’t get anyone to believe him.
   
2. The heroine, or a group, wants to overthrow a government or other authorities.
   
3. Strange events lead our hero to believe that everyone in this seemingly nice family, company, or town is actually hiding some horrific secret.
   
4. Our heroine is a spy or imposter who has infiltrated a group, and they’ll kill her if they discover her true identity.
   
5. A murder case has been cold for years...and suddenly, a new murder looks like it was committed by that same unknown suspect.
   
6. The hero must perform a difficult task or do something immoral, or else he or someone he loves will suffer.
   
7. The heroine must deliberately give up her own life in order to save the lives of others.
   
8. The hero must kill someone he cares about, or at least let that person die, in order to save a larger group of people.
   

50 FAMILY PLOTS

In a lot of mainstream fiction, young adult novels, scripts, and plays, family drama is front and center. It also might be a B story in your project, or a backstory for just about any character. A couple of these overlap with the romance plot ideas, but they play out quite differently within a family.

1. A family member is perpetually needy and manipulative, and now he has gone too far.
   
2. Someone in the family (not necessarily the parent) is emotionally or physically abusive.
   
3. A family member is having an extramarital affair...or at least, it sure looks that way.
   
4. She’s divorced...and the kids prefer the stepmom.
   
5. He’s their new stepdad...but the kids won’t give him a chance.
   
6. Someone in the family has a mental health issue such as depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoarding, or post-traumatic stress disorder, and this affects the others.
   
7. Someone in the family is just plain eccentric, and in certain situations, it’s embarrassing.
   
8. Someone is dying...of cancer, a brain tumor, or another disease. A family member has unresolved issues with the person, or alternately, she doesn’t know how she’s going to go on without him.
   
9. Someone has already died...and the family is struggling to deal with it.
   

1. A family member is a criminal of some kind. Maybe everyone finds out immediately, or maybe he kept it secret for years.
   
2. Everybody in the family is a criminal, which causes all kinds of complications.
   
3. One family member, willingly or unwillingly, suffers punishment for another’s misdeed.
   
4. Someone has converted to a new religion, joined a different political party, refused to work at the family business, or broken ranks in some other way that has the rest of the family upset.
   
5. A family member makes dramatic personal changes, and it’s hard for the family to reconcile this with the person they once knew.
   
6. The parents are on the brink of divorce, and the kids (who may be adults) aren’t dealing with it well.
   
7. The family faces financial difficulty: someone has lost her job, or the family business is dwindling.
   
8. A family member has a mental, physical, or learning disability that poses challenges for other family members as well.
   
9. The family has moved to a very different community or country from the one they were used to, and they are all struggling to fit in and feel at home.
   
10. Someone is pregnant, and others in the family disapprove...perhaps because she’s a teenager, a single woman over forty, or has eight kids already.
    

1. Someone is
   not
   pregnant, and it’s a problem. Maybe the couple’s been trying for years. On the other hand, maybe they don’t want kids, but their parents want to be grandparents.
   
2. Someone hid a pregnancy in the past, and now there’s a half-sibling or grandchild who nobody knew about until now.
   
3. A person tracks down her birth mother, or the birth mother tracks down her (possibly adult) child.
   
4. A parent expects his child to be perfect and/or achieve amazing things, even if this is unrealistic.
   
5. A parent is over-protective of a child, which leads to conflicts between them or with others.
   
6. A child is becoming an adult—and a parent or guardian can’t deal with it.
   
7. A child refuses to grow up—and it’s making the parent or guardian despair.
   
8. A family member resents doing more than her share of the work. She might be doing all the housework even though she has a full-time job, or she might be the only one taking care of her aging parent even though her siblings live in town.
   
9. Someone is doing something risky—enlisting to go to war, for example—and a parent or someone else in the family is against it.
   
10. Someone has abandoned the family...or at least it feels like it. This could be literal abandonment, or it could just be long days at the office.
    

1. A family member was estranged because she behaved deplorably in the past, but now she wants reconciliation.
   
2. The whole family or a few members are on a journey or quest and meet up with obstacles along the way.
   
3. The stresses of long hours at a job, parenting, and caretaking are pushing one or more family members to the breaking point.
   
4. The family members are separated against their wishes, perhaps by war, financial necessity, or for legal reasons.
   
5. They have a visitor or house guest, invited or not, who poses challenges. (Note that this is the plot of many ghost stories.)
   
6. Members of the family are in a legal battle over something, such as the custody of a child or the settlement of a will.
   
7. Members of the family are in a physical battle—on opposite sides of a war, or in opposite corners of a boxing ring.
   
8. A family member has an interest or activity that other people in the family disapprove of—or they would, if they knew about it.
   
9. One family member, likely a sibling, is jealous of the other, because of her relationship, wealth, success, attractiveness, children, or some combination of the above.
   
10. Two or more siblings are leaving the other one out of discussions, get-togethers, or even group vacations.
    

1. A gathering of the extended family brings up old tensions and/or new revelations.
   
2. The high expectations of an occasion, such as Christmas or a wedding, lead to stress and conflict.
   
3. A lack of communication in the family has led to a huge misunderstanding.
   
4. Family members disagree about whether to keep or sell a home, land, or a business.
   
5. Someone is getting married to a person that nobody else in the family can stand.
   
6. The families of an engaged couple meet for the first time, and it doesn’t go well—either because they are very different, or because some of the family members already have a history.
   
7. Two people in the family are in love with the same person.
   
8. Two people in the family are in love with and/or having sex with one another.
   
9. Parents refuse to have anything to do with their child because they disapprove of his lifestyle...or the child breaks things off with the parents, because he disapproves of them.
   
10. One family member loans a lot of money to another, who may not be able to pay it back after all.
    
11. The parents die, and one sibling has to take on the role of a parent.
    

25 WORKPLACE PLOTS

Not very many novels and scripts focus on the workplace, but workplace conflicts are a common subplot in all kinds of stories. Many of the conflicts here involve chain of command and teamwork, which make them appropriate for school stories and war stories as well.

1. A boss or employee is incompetent, stupid, rash, or lacks social skills.
   
2. Someone in a position of power is too demanding or just plain malicious and bullies subordinates.
   
3. The new person is different. Because of her gender, race, previous experience, or some other factor, she is ostracized or sabotaged.
   
4. The new boss is very young and/or inexperienced. No one trusts or respects her.
   
5. The new person has lied about his experience, and actually has no idea what he is doing.
   
6. The company is facing layoffs, which is freaking everyone out.
   
7. A person or team has been given a seemingly impossible assignment.
   
8. New procedures make it almost impossible to get even ordinary work done.
   
9. The work itself is so difficult, unpleasant, time-consuming, or dangerous that it’s ruining people’s lives.
   
10. Someone is asked to behave unethically in his job for the company’s benefit.
    

1. Someone knows about her company’s immoral actions. She either blows the whistle or debates whether she should.
   
2. Someone has behaved unethically in her job, and now it looks like she could be caught.
   
3. Someone is accused, rightly or wrongly, of behaving unethically or making a huge mistake, and he faces big consequences.
   
4. Family obligations, illness, addiction, or another factor makes it almost impossible for someone to meet the demands of the job.
   
5. A dramatic rumor, true or untrue, causes conflict among the staff.
   
6. A shocking or embarrassing secret about an employee becomes known to her co-workers.
   
7. An affair or a wanted or unwanted flirtation is disruptive to the team.
   
8. A romantic liaison between co-workers ends badly, causing problems.
   
9. Two co-workers are competing for the same promotion or plum assignment.
   
10. Two people vie for control over a group project.
    
11. Someone on the team isn’t pulling his own weight. He hardly does any work, and he’s getting away with it.
    
12. An employee is difficult to be around, perhaps because of her negative attitude, inane chatter, or poor hygiene.
    

1. Something’s been stolen—someone’s sandwich, office equipment, or sensitive files. It looks like an inside job, but nobody knows who did it.
   
2. Someone gets caught bad-mouthing a co-worker or superior. For instance, she accidentally sends a scathing email to the wrong person.
   
3. Someone takes all the credit for another person’s work. Maybe he presents her ideas as his own.