Quick!

[telophase]

Give me ideas for random plot twists or elements; things that might happen in a story. They can be as small or as grand as you like; as silly or as mundane as you like. Genre doesn't matter.

Here's a few to start with:

Your protagonist goes fishing.

The villain is actually a dupe for the person you thought was your best friend.

An unexpected letter arrives.

A unexpected letter arrives, addressed to someone else.


why no, of course I'm not considering writing a simple NaNoWriMo What To Write Next Generator to kick-start my brain out of its current fog. Er, not for writing NaNo myself, for coding-type things.

Comments

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

Your protagonist is caught in an sudden and unexpected rainstrom

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

You catch your cat leaving the apartment through a briefly appearing hole in the wall.

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

I HATE it when that happens

[longshot14.livejournal.com]

The protagonist's lover abruptly leaves him, for a previously-despised enemy, for no apparent reason.

[gryfeathr.livejournal.com]

A bitter argument suddenly tears the lead and supporting characters apart at a crucial moment.

[chomiji]

The protagonist finds something that she thought she had lost irretrievably long ago.

When the protagonist opens the deli bag, he finds that the sandwich he'd bought for his lunch is not what he had ordered at all.

The protagonist oversleeps on the morning of the first day of class - or a new job - because of an unnoticed power outage in the middle of the night.

The protagonist suddenly realizes that a building she passes every day to and from work (or school) has been completely replaced by another structure with a completely unfamiliar architecture.

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

The love of the protagonist's life is related to either him, or the antagonist, or both.

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

Oh no, this drink is poisoned!

[asteres.livejournal.com]

The protagonist is actually the bad guy. And we hate him.

Godot is not Rappaport.

The beginning is the end (Memento ring a bell?)

(OK, those are more plot devices, more than plot twists, but what the hell.)

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Goddamnit, the door's stuck shut and the window's too small to crawl through.

And when I woke up, I thought it would be over, but--

A strange child, alone, in the middle of the road.

[pseudo_tsuga.livejournal.com]

Two people who are close turn out to be on opposite sides because of irreconcilable ideological differences.

A student skips class to find out the source of that noise.

The protagonist strikes up an interesting conversation with a busker.