For the last stream, we tried out a new exercise: the 7x7x7 exercise.
To do it, you open up to the 7th page of a random book, find the 7th sentence on that page, and then write a 7-line story that starts with that sentence.
The sentence we got was from page seven of Patrick Rothfuss’s book The Wise Man’s Fear: “Graham stood with his thick hand poised to knock on the door.”
It actually ended up being a ton of fun, so much that we wrote two stories, and chat contributed several amazing ones of their own creation.
Here’s what we came up with: (the stories were 7 lines long in Word)
Story #1
Graham stood with his thick hand poised to knock on the door. As the thermal-insulated bag of pizzas burned in his hand, he reminded himself that this would all be worth it when he could afford that sweet Dodge Charger to take Nancy on a date with. There’s no way she could say no when he pulled up to her house in that shiny thing, no matter how much the other kids at Broadside High made fun of his meaty fingers. Graham had to remind himself of this fact again when the door opened and a gingerbread man giggled at him and dashed out the door, screaming, “You can’t catch me! I’m the gingerbread man!” Graham ran after him. Delivering in Christmas Town was tough, but the sweet tips were worth it.
Story #2
Graham stood with his thick hand poised to knock on the door. Then he stopped himself, laughing at his polite instinct. If he was going to go through with this, he had to strip himself of his former identity: the Graham who used to get As in school, the Graham who did everything that his parents told him to do, the Graham who suddenly realized one day when he got in a car accident that nearly killed him that he was going to waste his life following a path where he never actually lived. It was time to embrace the new Graham, the Graham who had friends – friends who needed something stolen from this house. Without another thought, Graham tiptoed over to the window, opened it up, and slipped inside.
And my absolute favorite, which was written by viewer gameon123321:
Graham stood with his thick hand poised to knock on the door.
Behind his back, he hid a dozen roses.
He breathed in.
Breathed out.
He cocked his hand.
With a sigh, he turned and walked away.
Maybe one day he’d knock.
This was a lot of fun. Not only was it a great way to get a random sentence, but since the writing assignment was so short, lots of people in chat contributed their own takes on it too, some of which blew my mind with how good they were.
You can watch the video here to see some of the other great takes on the opening sentence.
After that we did a writing prompt and chat voted for this one submitted by drayle88: “You have a very mundane superpower that you hide because you don’t want to be made fun of. Then you get the idea to use it to take over the world….”
The best part of this story was brainstorming all the super powers that were incredibly mundane, but also had secrets behind them that were powerful enough to potentially take over the world.
We came up with three such powers, and we couldn’t really decide between them, so we decided to just go ahead and use all three characters in the story. I’m really proud of how mundanely entertaining our final version ended up.
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: Deviantart/Xenobody