Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We’d already come up with our story idea in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: creating an idea toolbox.
An idea toolbox is basically a bunch of brainstorming. You come up with lots and lots of ideas by following these steps:
#1. Ask a question about your story idea
#2. Write whatever answers pop into your head (you can have multiple, even contradictory answers!)
#3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you have about a page full of information
#4. Read through your page and pick out the parts that “spark emotion,” things that get you excited to write
#5. Compile all your favorite parts together, then go back to step 1
As always, chat came up with some great questions and answers based on the idea we came up with. Here’s where we finally ended up:
Click here to see the text writeup of our idea toolbox.
That may look like a neat and tidy idea toolbox, but if you missed the stream definitely check it out at the link below. You can see just how messy it started out, and how much work went into getting it to be as comprehensible as it currently is.
I’m excited by the skeleton of our story, and to eventually bring it all the way to “publishable.” Tune in for the next stream to see what the next step to getting there is!
After that, we moved on to the prompt for the day. The chat voted on an image prompt for the first time, posted by Syraphia. You can see the image here.
There were a bunch of ways to take this story, everything from Lovecraftian horror to sci-fi adventure to absurd, but I absolutely love where we ended up.
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 Rubbish to Published and the writing prompt on YouTube, or watch the full stream on rerun until Twitch deletes it.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pakutaso