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Rubbish to Published: 5 easy questions to make an outline – Writing Stream Recap

Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”

We created character profiles in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: outlining.

To do this, all we had to do was ask five easy questions about our plot:

Click here to see the outline questions and our answers.

Thanks to all the great work we did last time with our character profiles, making the outline was easy. The only thing we were really missing was coming up with the ending.

But I think the ending we figured out works perfectly — I honestly couldn’t imagine a better way for a young adult parody to end. After that it was just a matter of tying the five parts together a bit more neatly, and we were done. A perfect skeleton to start putting some meat on!

After that we moved on to today’s prompt, and chat voted for this one submitted by Arashmin: “Playing around with a map app, you search a negative zip code and aren’t prepared for what it shows you.”

This was a great prompt, not only because it was fun and original, but also because it really showed off an important part of the writing process. For our first draft, we got so caught up in creating funny “inverse world” names of restaurants and ideas that the “psychological horror” aspect that chat also voted for was growing nonexistent.

But that’s perfectly fine! It was only our first draft, so it’s supposed to be messy and unfocused. Once we got to the end and went back and edited though, we trimmed most of the silly parts and I really like how our story ended up with a more consistent, darker tone.

You can read our story here.

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 or the writing prompts on YouTube, or watch the full stream on rerun until Twitch deletes it.

Hope to see you next time, friend!

Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl, forthcoming November 2018.

Featured image: Pakutaso

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