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Swapping and finishing stories with a viewer – Writing Stream Recap

For the last stream, we did one of my favorite writing exercises: swapping a half-written story with someone and finishing it.

For the stream, faithful viewer Octavia Memories volunteered to participate in the story swap. We both began with the same auto-generated sentence, then wrote for half an hour, swapped stories, and finished the other’s story.

This was always one of my favorite exercises to do during IRL writing workshops, since you can see all the different directions people take the same information. Not only does the same opening sentence lead to completely different starts, but then the endings can become totally different beasts than the beginning.

The sentence we started with was: “She advised him to come back at once.” Here’s the stories we came up with:

You can read what we wrote here.

I really enjoyed doing this. When I wrote The Veil, I imagined it going the somewhat-comical route, perhaps the queen removing the veil and revealing she was a Blue Dragon, eating the knight. But Octavia took it in a completely different direction.

And then for Octavia’s story, I really like where the chat and I took it. We were tempted to make it a comedy (his 20 years of silence being the long con for a bad joke), but ended up staying with the tone and making a heartwarming ending instead. D’aww.

After that we moved on to today’s prompt, and chat voted for this one submitted by JaegerStein: “You are an immortal being, currently working as a professor of history. Every student loves your lectures because of your vivid and lifelike narrative of historic events.”

This one was a lot of fun. It was great going through history and picking out events that the professor was present at, and the funny ways he influenced them. We even managed to get a bit of a creepy ending in there, which I’m always a fan of.

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-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).

And you missed the stream, you can still watch Rubbish to Published, the writing exercises, 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

Published inExercises/WritingFunnyGenres/StoriesRandom Inspiration