Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We picked our tense and POV in the previous stream, so it was finally time for our last step: writing chapter one.
When most people imagine writing a book, they think writers just get an idea and then start writing from the beginning to the end. But through this series, we’ve shown that isn’t the case at all. We’ve have ten steps before we were ready to write chapter one! So if you have an idea that you want to write, but you’re having trouble starting chapter one, no worries. There’s plenty of stuff you can do to get the juices flowing.
Since we’d done so much already, starting our chapter one was pretty easy. Chat voted for the opening sentence they liked best, and then we came up with this:
Click here to see the beginning of our chapter one.
I’m very happy with how our chapter one turned out so far, and we could have easily kept going. It just shows how doing all the prep work beforehand made the actual writing process so much easier.
Of course, all the prep work isn’t chiseled in stone. Even as we just wrote those first paragraphs, things started to shift a little bit, and that’s fine. Everything we’ve done up until this point is just drawing the map, but now, it’s time to actually take the journey — complete with all its unexpected bathroom breaks, breakdowns, pit stops, and tourist traps along the way.
After that we moved on to today’s prompt, and chat voted for this one submitted by Bestogoddess: “You and a bunch of friends are out camping, sitting around the fire and telling ghost stories. Suddenly, the fire turns a bright green, a ghost stepping out of it and sitting on a log. ‘That’s cute, but let me tell you a REAL ghost story straight from the afterlife.'”
I’ve got to be honest, this was the prompt I was least looking forward to writing of the three choices. I didn’t see any other way to take it aside from the ghost just telling them how boring the afterlife is with his “ghost job” and “ghost family” that he hates.
But, as always, chat surprised me. We figured out a way to make a real ghost story from the afterlife truly terrifying. I love what we came up with.
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: The ANGEL Weapon, forthcoming November 2018.
Featured image: Pakutaso