Sometimes you have an idea for a story but don’t know where to take it, or you have a chapter that’s killing you, or you just have no idea how to even start.
That’s where the Story Surgeon comes in! On the stream, I asked viewers to submit any stories they had that were on life support and in need of emergency operation. We’d take a look at them, operate, and prescribe some medication.
The first Story Surgeon patient was kittyashley, who only had a couple ideas and didn’t know how to turn them into a developed outline/plot.
Thankfully, that’s exactly what the story surgeon specializes in!
After going over kittyashley’s ideas, we turned them into a plot outline from start to finish of the book. Not every single detail was worked out, but that’s fine. Many of those details will be figured out as it’s written.
We basically boiled it down to something like this:
Shayla is a prisoner inside the Shalott Castle for Unfortunate Faeries, where faeries born without magical powers are sent to live under the watch of the powerful wizard Master Zoren.
But one day a new prisoner comes to the castle and shows Shayla and her friends that there are plenty of faeries outside the castle who don’t have powers. They weren’t sent to the castle because they lack powers… they were sent their because of their mental disabilities (depression, anxiety, ADHD, etc.) which the kingdom thought was too dangerous to have in combination with their magic. All this time, Master Zoren has been suppressing their powers with his mind control ability.
After learning this, they practice their powers in secret, and escape the castle. They try to get the help of their kingdom’s king and queen, but they are shunned. The kind and queen were the ones who ordered them all sent to the castle, and they imprison them again. They also send an army to remove Master Zoren, since he let the prisoners escape, but he fights back against them with his mind-controlled prisoners. He easily overtakes the army and moves in on the rest of the kingdom. Now it’s up to Shayla and her friends to save the people that spurned them, using their disabilities to their advantage.
It’s not the most fleshed-out plot in the world, but it’s definitely a start! It sounds pretty exciting to me, and I like the hook of combining mental health issues with magical powers.
You can see the process we went through here,
or just scroll down for the opening that we wrote.
After we wrote the outline, we also came up with the first 500 words or so to get kittyashley going. Here’s what we ended up with:
Every day is hard. Some days are impossible. Today was an impossible day.
The sunlight poured in through the opening in the stone wall of my chamber and burned across my eyelids. I tried rolling over on my straw mattress to get back to sleep, but it was useless. Now I was awake. Waking up was the worst part of the day. It was when terrible thoughts started entering my mind.
What if I messed up my serving duties today? What if Master Zoren was disappointed in me? What if I just dropped dead and nobody cared?
The worst part was, I wanted to wake up and do my best, but I couldn’t. Just the thin cloth sheet on top of me was like an iron slab. I closed my eyes and wished that I could just go back to sleep. Just close my eyes and never wake up. How nice it would be to just drift away and disappear.
RING!
The golden bell next to my bed jingled loud and piercing. It was the only other fixture in my bare room aside from my mattress and day-outfit. It hung on the wall, a simple white cloak with the crest of Shalott Castle for Unfortunate Faeries on it: a glowing orb with a crack running down the center almost ripping it in two. Because that’s what we were. Damaged. Incomplete. Unfortunate.
The bell rang again. It was the only thing that could get me out of bed. My duty to the castle. To Master Zoren.
I slowly sat up, and my iridescent wings unfolded and stretched out behind me. Their thin, muscly membranes fluttered up and down as if doing stretches, not that they needed to. I’d never used them to fly, and I never would. I didn’t need to fly to do the Master’s laundry.
I peeled away the sheet, now back to being just a cloth covering, stood up, and slipped on my day-outfit. Not a thought went through my head as I did it all mechanically. It was nice; no thoughts were better than terrible thoughts.
I grabbed onto the wooden handle of the door out of my room. That was all it took to trigger the thoughts. A panic gripped hold of me as I imagined going into the hallway, the others seeing me, making fun of me for waking up late, mocking me behind my back. I forced myself to take a deep breath. It didn’t help. But it didn’t matter. I had to help my Master. Somehow I turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped out into the hall.
The chamber wing of Shalott Castle extended far in both directions. The doors to all the other residents’ rooms were already open and vacated. Everyone else had already started their work day. I was last, as usual.
The thought of disappointing my Master made me run down the hall to the spiral metal staircase at the end. I sprinted down two steps at a time, going all the way to the laundry dungeon. There was a giant wooden vat full of warm water with washboards and soap leaning against the sides, along with cartfuls of clothes to wash. But that would come later. Right now, I needed to get my Master his morning clothes.
I grabbed the folded black robes that I’d meant to finish yesterday, tossed them over a board, and snatched the hot iron out of the coals. I quickly ironed them out, but there was no time for every crease. I did of course make sure the crest was perfectly flat.
Another bell rang in the laundry dungeon. I was out of time. I put back the iron, clenched the robes, and dashed back up the stairs, all the way to the top floor. By the time I reached the towering gold doors to my Master’s bedroom, I was out of breath and panting. I knocked as hard as I could, hoping he wouldn’t be disappointed in me.
“You may come in,” came his voice. My wings tensed up in fear, but I opened the door and walked into his chamber.
We were having so much fun writing the opening that we went way over the 500 word limit. But that’s a good thing! It shows how much potential this story has.
I also like how we didn’t start off with magical powers or explosions or action or anything like that. We start off nice and slow, setting the scene and tone, so that the reader can get familiar with the setting and Shayla’s depression before the plot really begins. Rather than having huge conflict right off the bat, we start off with a small conflict: will Shayla get out of bed? Followed by, will Shayla get her Master his clothes? Those are perfect little conflicts to start bringing the reader into the world.
Huge thanks again to kittyashley for submitting her ideas. Her story came in barely alive, and now it’s leaving the hospital smiling in a wheelchair. As long as it takes its prescription of about 500 words per day, it should be a healthy novel in no time!
After that, chat voted that we write this prompt created by the3dtom: “You don’t have an angel and a demon on your shoulders. You have two different demons, both of which can’t stand one another.”
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-11:30pm (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!
Featured image: Pakutaso