Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We did our query letter in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: plotting chapter by chapter.
For this one, we looked back over everything we’ve created thus far, picked out the best/important bits, and laid them out chronologically chapter by chapter. We also filled in the gaps by adding new plot points.
Thanks to all our hard work up until now, it was surprisingly easy! You can see what we came up with here:
Click here to see the chapter-by-chapter plotting for our story.
We’re getting close to the end here, I can almost taste it! There’s only one more Rubbish to Published before we arrive at the final one: writing the first chapter. It should be exciting!
After that, instead of writing a prompt for the day, we worked on our submission to the #TwitchWriters Short Story Anthology. We were lucky have our synopsis chosen to go to the final round, and now we have to write the first 500-750 words.
For those who missed it, here’s our synopsis:
At age five, David is told by his parents that he was adopted. They explain his birth parents’ drug habit that put his safety in jeopardy. David loves his parents for being honest with him and he grows up happily. But in another universe, David’s parents never told him he was adopted. He finds out by accident at age fifteen while undergoing a test for heart disease that the doctor lets slip his “birth father” had. David is furious at his parents and rebels against them, eventually becoming so frustrated that he runs away to search for his birth parents.
Another parallel universe has David’s birth parents find him at age twenty-five. They’ve been searching for him for years to start a relationship, both of them having kicked their habit. David is thrilled to find them, feeling like a void in his life has been filled. But as he spends more time with them, they start to turn back to their old ways, and they drag down David with them. In the last parallel universe, David cleans out his deceased parents’ house at age fifty and discovers his adoption paperwork. He tries to contact his birth parents but they’ve long since passed away. He’s filled with regret and wishes that he’d known sooner, then maybe he could’ve met them and his life would’ve been different.
Before we started to write the actual story, we had to figure out what we wanted to accomplish in our opening sentence. We narrowed it down to two things: (1) hook the reader with something interesting, and (2) show what our story is going to be about. It was difficult, but thanks to the help of chat, I love where we ended up. Here’s the opening sentence we went with:
Four Davids from different universes sat around the campfire, telling stories.
From there the story spilled out like a waterfall, and we wrote the first 550 words no problem. Fingers crossed that we make it to the next round!
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 reruns until Twitch deletes them.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl, forthcoming November 2018.
Featured image: Pakutaso