In her Adventures in Wonderland and on the other side of The Looking Glass, Alice discovers that sometimes there are different ways of looking at something.  When writing fiction, this is referred to as revisionism – the retelling of a story or type of story with substantial alterations in character or environment, to “revise” the view shown in the original work.

Gregory Maguire, who wrote Wicked, used that method to climb to fame as a writer who gives us ‘the rest of the story’.  He brought us a whole series of books based on The Wizard of Oz, as well as Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror, Mirror, and several other books that help us see that bad guys may have reasons for being bad, and are sometimes just misunderstood.

Over the years, I have participated in many groups and workshops where one of the exercises was to present a well-known tale from a point of view other than the hero or heroine. It requires you to create a backstory for the character you choose in order to bring him into the forefront of the tale. You have to start with “What if…?”

Another way of using “What if…” is to browse through the headlines on the internet or in the newspaper.  Read a story that catches your eye, and put yourself in the mind of, oh…the mother of the perpetrator of a crime, or the brother of a victim, or perhaps wonder what motivated the criminal or the victim in the first place. Think not of the actual crime, but of the repercussions it has on people who are not directly involved in it at all.

Observe an argument between a parent and child, or between two siblings, and put yourself in the shoes of one of them.  Look at lovers holding hands as they walk through the park, and wonder – What if… they had never met?

Walk across a college campus, or down the mall, or into an insurance office, grocery store, post office, or other place where strangers pass by on a regular basis.  What if …two of them bump into each other and discover they are long-separated siblings (Art can imitate life – check the headlines)? What if … that little boy holding his mother’s hand isn’t really her son?

There are thousands of “What if’s” out there waiting to be told.  What are you waiting for?  What if somebody else tells them first?