Since we’ve been trying out a lot of new exercises recently, for the last stream we went back to the classics: the poop book.
For the “poop book” exercise, we open up a Japanese kanji book to a random page, translate the poop-related example sentences for that kanji, and then chat picks one of them and we start a story with it. We’ve done it a couple times before, always producing hilarious results.
This time, we opened up to the kanji for “combine/group,” and this is the sentence chat voted for: “If you and I combine our powers, then we’ll be able to create even more amazing poops!”
What a crappy starting point! Here’s what we came up with:
“If you and I combine our powers, then we’ll be able to create even more amazing poops!”
Lindy hung her head in misery. “I really wish you’d stop referring to our pretzels that way, Mindy.”
“Why?” Mindy asked. The twin sisters were standing behind their pretzel vending table at the food court in the mall. A glass case of warm pretzels stood before them, along with a sign above that read in big, brown letters: “Pepper On Organic Pretzels.” The abbreviation “POOP” was emblazoned onto their aprons and hats.
Lindy glared at her sister. “You know why. Your stupid name for our business. I can’t believe I let you talk me into this….”
“What do you mean? It’s genius!” Mindy said. “To sell things nowadays, you have to stand out a bit anyway.”
“Yeah, we were supposed to stand out by combining my organic pretzel-making skills and your on-point peppering skills. Not stand out because we’re selling ‘poops.’ We haven’t sold one yet!”
“Who cares?” Mindy said. She took out her phone and held it up to Lindy. “Look at our Instagram page. We’ve got five thousand followers. All thanks to #POOP.”
Lindy snatched the phone out of her hand and scrolled down the page. Her eyes widened in horror. “Mindy, all these pictures… they’re just photos of our apartment toilet! With different dolls sitting on them or something. Is this one… is this my bowl of leftover potato salad on the toilet seat?”
“Of course,” Mindy said. “Gotta get the people excited somehow.”
Before Lindy could reply, there was a cough from in front of the vending table. They both looked over, and a large man in sunglasses sipping on straw from a paper cup was standing there, waiting for them.
“You guys are the Pepper On Organic Pretzels girls, right?” he asked.
Mindy gave Lindy an I-told-you-so look, took her phone back, and answered him with a smile. “Yes we are! Would you like a freshly-peppered pretzel? Special discount for Instagram followers, only–”
“Wait, you sell pretzels?” he said. He lifted up his sunglasses and took a closer look at the glass warming case. “Oh. I thought ‘pretzels’ was just a funny way of referring to toilets. Sorry, not interested.”
He let his sunglasses fall back down, took a loud slurp from his straw, and turned around to leave.
“Wait a minute!” Lindy yelled after him. “You were seriously going to buy an organic toilet? And one that’s been ‘peppered?’ What did you think you were going to get here?”
The man stopped, took another slurp, and turned his head back to the twins.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t judge me.”
I actually kind of like that we took the “poop prompt” and turned it into something not actually poop-related. Thanks to chat for the great suggestions as always.
After that we moved on to today’s prompt, and chat voted for this one submitted by knever: “You’ve had many near-fatal accidents in your life, but always come out unscathed. You discover that you have a “guardian” angel that has been trying to protect you, but was accidentally causing all of those accidents in the first place. It turns out they cheated on their guardian angel exams.”
This prompt took a lot of planning, but I like what we came up with: a guardian angel who stopped you from encountering minor inconveniences but inadvertently creating huge disasters. And I really like the reason we came up with for why the angel revealed himself to his human, and how he cheated during the exam. A lot of fun creativity for this one.
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: GAHAG