Storm Yourself with “What Ifs”

Set a timer for eleven minutes, 11 seconds. That’s it. Magical 11:11 to go full feral on your imagination.

Write down as many What if? questions about your story as you can. No self-editing. No logic. No inner committee meetings about plausibility. Just go.

What if your hero is secretly the villain?

What if the whole thing takes place in a bubble?

What if the cat talks?

What if the cat talks and also has a podcast?

What if the podcast has a million followers and climbing?

What if your protagonist joins a pyramid scheme halfway through Act Two?

What if your romcom hinges on a bad Yelp review?

What if the villain is your main character’s therapist?

You get the drift. Keep going.

The point isn’t to make sense. It’s to shake your imagination loose from the “safe” ideas you’ve been slow-cooking for weeks. Chaos is creative rocket fuel. You need a mess before you can find the nuggets worth keeping. I do this all the time—especially when I paint myself into a corner, which is often. While writing Buried in Light, one wild what if about a secret brother blew the whole story open and gave me my surprising but inevitable ending. Boom.

To make the most of this, put yourself in a slightly chaotic environment. Try a café in Colonia San Antonio—one where musicians wander in, play a haunting ballad, then vanish like espresso ghosts. Maybe a señora pops by selling herbs from the campo that cure heartbreak, insomnia, or make credit card debt disappear. Maybe a pigeon struts in like he owns the place. That’s the energy you want. Lean into it.

Oh—and BTW, I’m helping a friend craft a book of cat stories based on the real adventures of her feline, Mocha. For reals. So if the cat in your scene suddenly develops a strong opinion on NeoPlatonic theory in the time of the Medici, don’t panic. Just write it down.

Set the timer. Go wild. What if this is the breakthrough you didn’t know you needed?

Awarded for "Buried in Light" written by Lorraine Flett ©2025