If you’ve never seen the website The Fanfic Maker, then you should probably change that immediately by checking it out. It’s amazing. All you have to do is put in some parameters and then bam! You have fresh fanfiction written about whatever you want.
One of my favorite exercises is generating a fanfic, and then going through and editing it to try and make it into something actually readable. It can be quite a challenge, and even though it’s a bit silly, you can learn a lot from it.
Case in point: the story of Serenity and the Stolen Eyeball.
During the last stream, chat came up with all the characters and other parameters, and we generated a story that I had to edit into something actually readable.
You can see what we got here. I recommend at least taking a quick look, just so you know the level of flaming garbage we were working with.
Here’s what we edited it into:
My name is Serenity and I’m an intern at Green Lantern Corps, a training facility for teens with superpowers. If I’m being honest though, I didn’t even know I had superpowers until the other day. I was sitting in the cafeteria at my high school, eating lunch alone like usual, when suddenly I felt something cold in my pockets. I reached inside and pulled out fistfuls of ice cubes. I definitely hadn’t put them there before!
I dropped them on my lunch tray, hoping nobody would notice, but there were already even more in my pockets waiting for me. I scooped them out too and laid them on top of the others, nearly covering my entire tray. At that point the noise of the clanging cubes and me frantically grabbing them had attracted some attention, but I hadn’t noticed yet – there were still more cubes flowing out of my pockets. All around me the other students went quiet and stared as I pulled out more and more ice cubes, desperately tossing them onto the table. My tray wasn’t even visible anymore underneath the growing mountain of ice. With each handful of ice cubes I took, they just kept coming out even faster!
Finally, when the pile of ice cubes towered over my head and was spilling all over the floor, I noticed. The entire cafeteria was silent. All eyes were on me. My face burned hot enough to melt all the ice, and I ran out of the cafeteria, ice cubes still spilling out of my pockets behind me in my wake.
I went to the principal. I sat in his office, crying as he gave me some spare plastic bags to tie around my pants pockets and catch the streams of ice cubes. He quickly picked up the phone; I thought he was calling my parents. But when he handed me the receiver, it wasn’t mom or dad, it was a man named Steve.
Steve said he was the head of an organization called the Green Lantern Corps, and they helped teens with special powers like me. I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, I just wanted the ice cubes to stop coming out of my pockets! He chuckled and said not to worry, someone would be over soon to pick me up and explain.
With that, he cut off our call. I was furious! Who did this Steve guy think he was, anyway? I was having a supernatural disaster here! I needed help. I needed reassurance. I needed more plastic bags. I needed to get to the bathroom and take off these pants to see if that would stop the stupid ice cubes from–
That was when she walked into the office. The girl who was sent to pick me up. She was tall, lean, dark, and muscular, like a delicious piece of beef jerky. Her shadow-black hair was pulled back into a pony tail that looked sharp enough to cut steel. And yet, her face was soft and caring as she looked at me and spoke.
“Hi Serenity,” she said, her voice smooth like polished iron. “My name’s Tuli. We have a lot to discuss.”
Tuli. I was already in love.
As you can see, the edited version is very different from the original. And that’s perfectly fine. Quite often when you go through the editing process, your final piece will look nothing like your original.
I like to think about editing as having three different levels:
- Bomb Level Editing – When you blow up what you had and completely replace it (75% or more change).
- Machete Level Editing – When you hack away/add in big swaths to what you had (about 50% change).
- Scalpel Level Editing – When you just delete/add in small things (less than 25% change).
If we’d tried to do machete or scalpel level editing to the original story, it would’ve still been a disaster. We needed to blow it up and start again from the ground up.
That’s something that happens often in writing, so it’s good to get some practice with it… even if it does require reading eye-melting auto-gen fanfiction.
After that exercise chat voted we write this prompt by Mister_Phantom: A masked superhero leaves criminals to the police and other superheroes and instead goes around to help disabled people, give advice to the depressed, and just generally be there at someone’s darkest hour to remind them they are not alone.
Or you can watch a quick video of us writing/reading 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.
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