I have never been the recipient of an extravagant inheritance. No English country estates or rare car collections or Scrooge McDuck-level vaults of swimmable gold coins have fallen into my lap, nor does it appear from Ancestry.com that they are likely to. It seems I come from relatively modest folk with no ties to royalty or giants of American industry or intrepid world explorers who may have amassed a hoard of precious items stolen from their rightful owners. Which, I imagine, is where most of us find ourselves.
Is that why we love stories about unexpected inheritances so much? Because we’re not likely to experience it in life so we can only hope to experience it through fiction?
Inheritance stories are fun because they allow us to imagine what we would do if we were in that situation. (We’d certainly handle it better than that guy.) But they’re also common enough that as writers we might feel they’ve been done to death and we have nothing new to add to the conversation.
But let’s test that theory, shall we?
Weekly Wolf: The Inheritance
Premise: Your character is living an unremarkable life, or perhaps even struggling mightily to make ends meet when they receive a call from a law firm handling the estate of an estranged relative who has died. Believe it or not, your character has been named the sole beneficiary. What do they get? Some possibilities might include…
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