What-If Generation
A spark is not yet a story because nothing in it is under pressure. A what-if puts it under pressure: someone wants something, and the spark makes that hard. Generate widely, then let the user choose.
Start from the kind of spark
| Spark | Ask first | Pressure usually comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Image (a drowned bell tower) | Who is looking at it, and why does it matter to them? | The history the image implies, or what happens if it changes |
| What-if (grief can be sold) | Who gains, who loses, who is the first to refuse? | The rule's side effects and the people it hurts |
| Character (a keeper who never leaves the rock) | What would force them to do the thing they never do? | The one situation their nature cannot handle |
| Setting (a city that moves every winter) | Who is left behind, and who decides the route? | The setting's rules and the people who enforce them |
| Feeling (dread in a happy house) | What event would earn that feeling honestly? | The gap between how things look and what is true |
Angles
Run the spark through several angles. Each line of output is one short sentence starting "What if".
- Invert it. Flip who holds power, who is guilty, what is normal. What if the ghost is the one being haunted?
- Raise the cost. Make the spark expensive for the person closest to it. What if selling grief also sells the memory of the person?
- Give it to the wrong person. The least equipped, the most compromised, the one who benefits from it staying broken.
- Put a clock on it. A deadline, a season, a tide, a vote, a pregnancy, a sentence.
- Move it. Another century, another class, another country, a smaller scale (one street) or a larger one (a whole nation).
- Make it personal. Tie the spark to a relationship: the sibling, the ex, the parent, the child.
- Find the first. The first person to discover, refuse, exploit, or be harmed by the spark.
- Find the last. The last keeper, the last believer, the last one who remembers.
- Ask who profits. Every strange rule has someone who benefits from it. That person is often the antagonist.
- Collide genres. Put the spark in a heist, a romance, a
courtroom, a quest. Genre supplies a shape and reader expectations
(see the
genre-craftskill).
Worked example
Spark: a lighthouse keeper who has never left the rock.
- What if the lighthouse is decommissioned and she has thirty days to leave?
- What if a boat wrecks on the rock and the only survivor claims to be her sister?
- What if she has been told the mainland was destroyed, and it was not?
- What if her keeping is the only thing stopping something at sea from coming ashore?
- What if the keeper is twelve, and her father has not come back from the supply run?
Lines 1, 2, and 5 already imply a want, an obstacle, and a clock. Line 3 is a twist, not a premise: ask what the story is before the reveal. Line 4 is a genre shift toward horror or fantasy; offer it, do not push it.
Filtering
Before presenting, drop what-ifs that:
- Have no person in them (a pure world concept with nobody to suffer it)
- Resolve in one scene (the answer is obvious once asked)
- Depend entirely on a twist, with nothing to dramatise before it
- Repeat another line with different nouns
Keep 8-12. Mark the ones that already imply conflict; let the user pick. Combining two what-ifs is often the strongest move: a character spark plus a setting spark gives both a person and pressure.