September Shorts: The 100, The Boys and The Highwaymen

Imagine if children were in charge of society and adults were banished. That’s an inversion that The 100 has a pretty good go at exploring. Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses is an inversion, Amazon Prime's The Boys is too. And Neflix's The Highwaymen also inverts expectation. Instead of telling the gangsters-on-the-run story of Bonnie and Clyde, it focuses on Hamer and Gault, the two aging Texas Rangers who were hired to track down and kill the bandits. I came to it through Thomas Newman's haunting score, but stayed for the terrific performances.

Inversions are a great place to start if you're running a workshop or a story-plotting session. Invert a heist story, and tell the tale of a thief who, overwhelmed by guilt, attempts to secretly return every item they've ever stolen.

Or consider this list:

• Classic inversions: Choose a fairy tale and reverse the roles – make the heroes of the story into villains and vice versa.
• Historic inversions: This is used to create a world for the story. Imagine an event in history, perhaps a battle or war, and flip it. A good example is if the Nazi regime in 1940s Germany had won the Second World War. This is the premise of several TV series and the Carnegie Medal-winning novel Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner.
• Power inversions: Who holds the power? Who makes the rules? Flip it. The day the school children took over, or suddenly pets are in charge.
• Gender inversions: Great for puncturing classic gender stereotypes.
• Climate inversions: Again, good for settings. Imagine the United Kingdom as arid desert. How did it get like that? What is society like now?
• Character inversions: Characters that we normally imagine to be good turn out to be evil and vice versa. Rather like classic inversions but with just one character rather than the whole story. This could be a sadistic doctor or a kind vampire.

More on inversions, updates and rewites in Storycraft, coming this October... and tomorrow, when we take on Cinderella.