A speedrun for a video game is where you try to get through the game as fast as possible. Good speedrunners can complete games in mere minutes, where it would take a normal player hours, or even days to finish.
So then what would a “writing speedrun” look like? Today, we find out!
During the last stream, we tried out a running speedrun. Unlike video games, writing doesn’t have a definite “end,” so we had to come up with some rules:
DA WRITING SPEEDRUN RULES:
1) We had one hour.
2) We had to write stories for six prompts.
3) Each story had to be at least 100 words long.
4) The stories had to make sense and have some sort of actual ending.
There are many other ways we could have done a writing speedrun, but this is how we decided to start off.
Video game speedrunning often has different categories, such as “100%” (when every single thing in a game is completed), “Any%” (where some things are skipped to reach the end faster), “Glitchless” (where no glitches are used), and more.
For the purposes of our writing speedrun we created the categories 161% (1 hour to write 6 prompts 1 hundred words or more each) and glitchless (the stories have to actually make sense).
You can watch the speedrun here. Chat was on fire
with both great ideas and trying to distract me.
After that, since we already did six prompts, we decided to do a stipulation prompt. Chat voted for this one: We can’t use the same word twice. That means we can only use “a,” “the,” “he/she,” and every other word once and then it’s done!
An incredibly difficult stipulation, but incredibly fun too! Chat voted that we use it to write this prompt created by Antiversehero: Humans have entered the realm of galactic politics. Good News: We’re cute to almost every species. Bad News: We’re extremely cute to almost every species.
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 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 March 2019.
Featured image: Pakutaso