For the last stream’s exercise, we tried a new exercise: writing a story where every sentence has a food word in it.
This was suggested by viewer iWriteGooder, and I liked it because of its unique restriction.
Food words could be anything from food items themselves (“bread”) to metaphors using food (“egg him on”) to cooking terms (“boiling”), the only exception being puns (no “he tried to catch-up” or “won’t you lettuce try?” allowed).
As usual, chat voted for the opening sentences and then we went wild. Here’s what we came up with:
They say women age like fine wine, she, however, was sour from day one. And that’s precisely why she was the apple of my eye. Unlike the other girls in my kindergarten class, she was not made of sugar, spice, and everything nice. She was much more peppery: she had a kick like habanero when playing kickball on the blacktop, she wasn’t afraid to call people out when they didn’t cut the mustard, and during indoor recess when we played board games, her language was downright salty and delicious.
My love for her only grew more sizzling as the years went by. In middle school she looked pretty as a peach at the seventh grade dance, but I was too chicken to ask her out. And yet I fell even more in love with her, watching from afar after she punched a classmate in the gut for saying she had a nice muffin top.
In high school, I finally spilled the beans. I asked her to be my sweetheart, but she just said, “Get lost, shrimp!” Her lack of culture just egged me on even more. I came up with a whole bunch of half-baked ideas to try and get her attention, each one more nuts than the last, but they each ended up with me just clamming up and having egg on my face.
And yet I was still hungry for her. She was the jelly to my peanut butter… a jelly that had too many chunks and seeds in it that made you choke as you ate it, but was so delicious you couldn’t stop.
After graduation, I decided to work out and become a real beefcake, hoping to capture her attention. Every day, I went into the coffee shop she worked at and, cool as a cucumber, casually showed off my bulging muscles as I ordered a latte. It wasn’t usually my cup of tea, but it was an idea that I’d had brewing for a while: order what she always orders, and maybe she’d find me more appealing.
I’d ordered over a hundred lattes and had burst through a dozen shirt sleeves, but still got nothing more than a refrigerator-cold shoulder each time.
Until today, when the fat hit the fryer.
“I’ll take one latte,” I ordered like usual, “and for dessert, how about your phone number?”
She glared at me, more sour than a green-apple lollipop. “Why do you always say all these cheesy things?”
Suddenly, I was in a pickle. She’d never spoken to me with such vinegar in her voice. I grit my teeth and smiled.
“How else can I can get you to go out with me if I don’t spam you with attention?”
I saw a crack in her shell. “You know, you’re one smart cookie. Always with the corny jokes and whatnot. You make it seem like a piece of cake, but you really have to use your noodle, don’t you?”
“For me, the cream naturally rises to the top,” I said. “So will you go on a date with me? We can go to a restaurant, the movies, the whole enchilada!”
She made a bitter face. “I don’t want to do any of those vanilla things! Come over to my place and we can be couch potatoes and play video games.”
Up until then, I didn’t know it, but my love for her had only been an appetizer. It was at that moment that my heart finally found its main course. From that day on, I promised her to be the bread winner until we were both old and crusty, and she only had one thing to say:
“You’re such a wiener!”
This exercise ended up being a lot harder than I expected! We spent over two hours on it. Even though I’m proud of the final product and think it’s hilarious, it still has a couple of flow problems that could’ve used some fixing that we simply didn’t have time for.
But still, it was a good creative workout, and I have a feeling we’ll be doing this exercise again in the future. Once I’ve had a nice, long brain break.
After that we did a writing prompt and chat voted for this one submitted by Daneil_The_Thinker: “You make a deal with a dark entity, but it panics when it realizes it cannot hold up its end of the bargain.”
Brainstorming what kinds of wishes the demon couldn’t fulfill was a lot of fun, and I left it to chat to vote for which one we went with.
I’m really happy with how this turned out, especially the ending.
Or you can watch it 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