Writing with dragons

What if you took a classic of literature and added “with Dragons” to the end? I played around with this exercise the other day and came up with some fun story ideas. Moby-Dick, except instead of a white whale you have a giant purple dragon named Porphyrion destroying an airship.

This game expanded the idea of a typical fantasy dragon story beyond the usual scope. Instead of a knight fighting a dragon, what if you had a Don Quixote type character who keeps challenging Celestagon, the Weary, to a fight to the death but is clearly a buzzed old man in shoddy armor?

Interesting to a degree. But then today ChatGPT asked me, “Do you have any core themes or recurring ideas you want to explore?”

You know what, actually I do.

Creativity is my theme. It’s almost all I think about: writing, building, art, game design, programming, and anything else where somebody takes raw material and turns it into something new. My favorite fantasy stories are about things like building a kingdom, cooking great food, managing a dungeon, or developing the printing industry in a world of magic. I want more than epic battles and leveling up can provide.

So I went back to some of the dragon story ideas I generated and recast them with the theme of “creativity”. The result, a much better story idea. The character has something they care about. Because of this, the story ideas start to feel like they could be the prologue to a larger story. And I’m just plain more excited myself to start writing.

So what’s the lesson? Take a classic story, add a fun constraint, and sprinkle liberally with your favorite theme.