Just as your body needs regular exercise to stay fit, as a writer, you also need to exercise your mind. Especially if you’re a fiction writer, challenging yourself with creative writing projects helps keep your mind in great shape. There are many ways to boost your creative writing skills, such as using topic or sentence prompts.
Another fun activity you might want to try is to take a popular story you’ve read in the past and change it. You can create a new adaptation that includes numerous changes or one, main change. The exact type of change you choose to implement isn’t as important as the thought process you’ll go through to think of a new version and the writing process of merging your ideas into the existing text from the old story. In this post, you’ll find several ideas for things you might want to try changing in a story:
How would the story end if you were to re-write it?
The ending is often the most challenging part of a story to write. After all, writers want their readers to go away satisfied. Just as first impressions have an impact on readers – if they hate the first few pages, they won’t keep reading – an ending that satisfies readers will keep them coming back for more of your writing.
You can approach this creative writing exercise in several ways. You can choose a story with an ending you love and try to change it, or you can choose a story with an ending you didn’t like and try to improve it. You might also try writing an opposite ending. For instance, if you’ve chosen a romance novel where the couple lives happily ever after, you might adapt it so that the story has a tragic ending instead.
Choose a new setting for an old story
What would J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series be like if it took place somewhere other than middle earth? What other stories can you think of that might be greatly affected by a change of setting? For instance, can you re-write Snow White in outer space or a metropolis instead of the forest?
Make the protagonist and antagonist switch roles
Think of a story you’ve read where the lines were clearly drawn between who the hero of the story was as opposed to the villain. What would the story be like if, at some point, the protagonist became the villain and vice versa? What if the wicked witch of the west has a change of heart and wants to help Dorothy and Toto, while the wizard wants to keep them in Oz forever?
Additional factors you can adapt in a story
There are many other ways to challenge your creative writing skills by adapting old stories. You might try changing a time period. Does the story take place in the Victorian era? Why not re-write it to be futuristic or in present time? You might even consider merging two different stories. What would happen if characters from a Charles Dickens story met up with Mr. Tumnus and others from Narnia?
There’s no right or wrong way to go about this creative writing challenge, except that the primary goal is to take an existing story and adapt it. You can change the ending, the beginning, a specific chapter or the entire story! It’s up to you!
