They always say that your first draft should be absolute garbage. Then, once you’ve finished the story to the end, you should go back, hack it to pieces, and edit it into the shining gem of a story that was hiding underneath the whole time.
To take that idea to the extreme, we decided to try our hand at editing one of the worst-imaginable first drafts: auto-generated fanfiction.
During the last stream, we had chat come up with suggestions for characters and more at the Fanfic Maker. The site took in all our inputs and produced a horrifically beautiful piece that wove them all together in one incomprehensible tapestry.
(You can read what it produced here if your mind is ready.)
After we had a good laugh reading through it together, we tried to figure out what the main story was that it was trying to tell. We essentially boiled it down to a group of orphans with superpowers being held captive in a criminal orphanage.
With those ideas in mind, we rewrote the beginning, trying to set the scene and tone as clearly as possible.
Here’s what we came up with:
Thirteen-year-old Rainbow Fluffiness finished her ten-hour shift at the Happiness Plant. As soon as the bouncy jingle came over the loudspeaker, Rainbow let out an exhausted sigh of relief. She’d been sitting on the metal stool in front of the conveyor belt all day long, and underneath the rubber gloves, her hands ached and throbbed. When she took them off, her fingers were red and inflamed from performing the same simple movement, inserting a metallic cylinder into a sphere with a hole, three-thousand six-hundred times.
She counted each last one, just like she’d done every day for the past three years. It was the only way she could pass the time without getting in trouble.
But now her shift was over, and along with the other seventeen children in Section B, Rainbow made her way off the work floor to the living quarters. Their matching gray uniforms and gray shoes clacked on the sterile tile ground as they filed through the door. Watching over them was a guard in black from head to toe. Even though his eyes were hidden behind an opaque visor, Rainbow could tell that he was watching each and every one of them. His gloved hands twitched as they held onto the long, sharpened taser, itching for any opportunity to use it on the children.
Rainbow stared straight ahead as she walked single-file with the others into the cafeteria. As soon as they were out of sight from the guard, the other children started laughing and talking with each other, taking their seats at the long metallic tables. The dinner trays were already served at each available seat: a carton of milk, a steaming bowl of Nutrition Soup, and a single slice of cheese wrapped in plastic. The soup itself didn’t taste like much, mostly just hot water, but if you mixed in the cheese with a spoon, then it wasn’t that bad.
Rainbow reached for her plastic cheese, but before her fingers touched it, it was snatched away into the air. It stood hovering in front of her, bobbing up and down. Rainbow rolled her eyes and groaned.
“Come on, Skinny Jimmy,” she said. “Give it back.”
“Not until you give me a blast,” came a voice from nowhere.
Rainbow sighed and held out her hands. She concentrated on “wagging her inner tail,” as she liked to call it, moving a muscle that she felt she had that no one else did. As soon as she did, little rainbow sparkles came pouring out of her palm and landing into the air. Skinny Jimmy turned to the side, no longer invisible, revealing himself as catching them all in his own hands.
“Thanks!” he said, tossing me back my cheese. “These things really spice up the soup. I don’t get why you don’t use them in your own.”
This beginning was a ton of fun to rewrite! We had to stop ourselves from continuing it even further. We didn’t even get to the part where we show off the other kids’ powers, talk about how they got them through radiation poisoning at the plant, and how Skinny wants to band the orphans together and escape while Rainbow wants to keep everyone safe. The conflict!
If you read the original auto-generated fanfic, then you can see that the difference is night and day. What was once a mesmerizing mess is now an actual story. Sure, it’s not perfect, but we would have never gotten to this point if we didn’t start with the mess, and the same goes for all of our own “serious” writing too. To get to the good stuff, you have to start with garbage, and that’s perfectly fine.
After that, chat voted that we write this image prompt created by Tiix: (Click here to see the image.)
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 them on the YouTube channel 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 December 2018.
Featured image: Pakutaso