Our last stream (with special guest Abbey) was on New Year’s Day, so we decided to ham it up as our theme and use it as our muse.
For our first writing exercise, we started off with a vote for the chat to pick which New Year’s topic we should write about (“a New Year’s Eve party” won), and we got a randomly-generated sentence to begin it with.
It was probably the hardest opening sentence we’ve had yet, but I’m happy with where it ended up. You can read what we wrote here: (the bold sentence is the randomly-generated sentence we had to start with)
A purple pig and a green donkey flew a kite in the middle of the night and ended up sunburnt. They didn’t usually venture out of the safety of their farm, but since it was New Year’s Eve 2027, they decided to make an exception.
The two of them walked to the nearby beach with the kite that pig had found earlier at Dollar General. It had taken him half an hour of snuffling through the piles of merchandise spilled on the floor everywhere, but it was worth it. The kit was bigger than either him or Donkey, and it was shaped like a massive silver triangle.
“I don’t think I can run fast enough to get this into the sky, Donkey,” Pig said. He waddled his fat little body along the sand, struggling to jump over the humans who were lying about.
“Don’t worry about it,” Donkey said. “Here, tie the end to my tail.”
Donkey laid down on the sand and Pig tied the kite string in a nice little bow on the top of Donkey’s tail. When it was nice and tight, he gave Donkey a slap on the behind to get him trotting.
“Here we go!” Donkey brayed to the night sky. He galloped faster and faster, kicking up sand behind him as Pig cheered and the kite rose higher into the sky. The stars and moon reflected off the metallic plastic, making it look like a shoddy homemade U.F.O. soaring through the air.
Pig grunted out blissful oink after oink, watching Donkey run in circles, leaping over battered umbrellas and rusted beach chairs. The tide came in an out, bringing with it yellow crabs the size of microwaves that glanced at Donkey, clacked their claws in disapproval, and scuttled away.
It was the best New Year’s Eve that Pig had had in a long time. Probably ever since that one year when Farmer Tom went missing.
But it had to come to an end. The sun peeked above the horizon, bringing with it a searing heat. No o-zone layer meant no protection from its deadly UV rays. As soon as the orange and red started bleeding into the black night sky, Pig felt his skin start to burn.
“Donkey!” he called. “We have to go now.”
“All right.” Donkey slowed and the kite withered down to the sand. “But maybe we can do this again next year?”
“Of course,” Pig said. “It’s a New Year’s tradition.”
The two friends walked along the beach back toward the safety of their hydroponic farm near the shore. Holes carved in the sides allowed them easy access, and the metal protected them from the sun.
Along the ground behind them, Donkey dragged the kite. On it were the words: “Happy New Year 2025! Let’s Celebrate the Nu-Clear New Year!”
Hooray for post-apocalyptic New Year’s parties!
It may not be exactly what you’d imagine when you think “New Year’s Eve party,” but I think we did a good job with the opening sentence we were given.
In fact, this exercise showed off how important it is to just get something written down. When we were starting out, we had no idea how the story was going to end up tying together odd-colored animals, kites, sunburns, and New Year’s. It wasn’t until about halfway through that the post-nuclear-apocalypse idea came out of practically nowhere, and then we played up the idea more in the second draft by adding details and chopping things that didn’t make sense anymore.
Editing is such an important part of the writing process, and it’s not given nearly enough credit. If you have something you want to write, then just do it! Get something down on the page and don’t worry at all about it being perfect. If even a story about rainbow-colored animals flying kites and getting sunburns on New Years can be brought together somewhat cohesively through editing, than anything you write certainly can too.
After that we moved on to the writing prompt, and the chat voted on this one by gameon123321: “A dragon kidnaps a prince by mistake.”
Of course since it was New Year’s we had to put a holiday twist on it. Being forced to do so really added a whole new dimension to the story, and I’m really happy with how it turned out, especially thanks to some great suggestions by chat.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 7:30pm-9:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch it here on rerun until Twitch deletes it.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pinterest