Sometimes you gotta get the writing juices flowing with a good, random opening sentence. But coming up with a random sentence is harder than it seems.
So why not use the 7th sentence on the 7th page of a nearby book, and then write a 7-line story that starts with it?
During the last stream, we died the 7x7x7 writing exercise. Chat suggested some of their favorite books, and then we found the 7th sentence on page 7.
Here’s the five that they came up with:
1) Animal Farm: “No, comrades, a thousand times no!”
2) Hitchiker’s Guide: “He stuck out his tongue.”
3) The Book Thief: “Well, what else do you want me to do?”
4) Hunted by Shadows: “I thought you might actually be an adult about it.”
5) Circe: “I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.”
In the end it was a tight race between numbers 4 and 5, but 4 came out on top in the end!
I wrote two stories starting with the sentence, and chat wrote a bunch of
awesome ones! You can see them all here.
After that, chat voted that we write this prompt: Everybody assumes you’re an amazing ice mage, but in reality you’re just a really bad fire mage.
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 (Edited by me)