For the last stream, we did one of my favorite writing exercises: swapping a half-written story with someone and finishing it.
We’ve done this a couple times before, and this time faithful viewer NicoleDark volunteered to participate. We both began with the same auto-generated sentence, then wrote for half an hour, swapped stories, and finished the other’s story.
The sentence we started with that chat voted for was: “She folded her handkerchief neatly.” Here’s the stories we came up with:
You can read what we wrote here. (The places we stopped and the other picked up are bold.)
Just like the other story swaps we’ve done, I really enjoyed this. It’s always fun to see how differently people interpret the same opening lines, and how differently the stories end up from what they envision.
I really like where we took Nicole Dark’s story. At first I was a little worried because I wasn’t sure how we were going to get it all to work (what crime did she commit? where was her cellmate? why was she obsessed with cleaning?), but I think we made it all come together nicely in a fun, surprise twist.
After that we moved on to today’s prompt, and chat voted for this one submitted by thestuffedalligator: “While checking your garden, you notice something a little odd. Looking closer, you find a tiny homestead nestled underneath your zucchinis, with a tiny farmer standing out front. She waves at you.”
This story ended up pretty cool. I love how it starts off so bright and sunny and happy, just a fun gnome in a garden… and then takes a different turn.
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