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.
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!
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.
For the last stream’s exercise, we tried a spin on something we’ve done before: editing a viewer’s story.
The previous times we’ve done this, we usually only edited the first few paragraphs. But this time, the story was short enough for us to edit the entire thing, start to finish.
The lucky victim, er, viewer was geibielle, who was kind enough to let us edit their story. Huge thanks to them!
Here’s what their story looked like before and after:
For the last stream’s exercise, we did something we’ve done before: edit the beginning of a viewer’s story.
FateOfSilver was generous enough to allow us to use their story for the exercise. But this time, rather than completely rewrite what they had written, we instead focused on doing more detail-oriented editing. FateOfSilver had crafted a nice opening, but it was a little too fast and was missing out on some juicy specifics.
So we employed a tactic that I wrote about nearly two years ago: cracking open scenes with the Hammer of Details.
Take a look at the original and our rewrites below.
The last stream was special guest Abbey’s last chance to join us for a while, so she got to pick what we did. And she picked one of her favorite exercises: editing auto-generated fanfiction.
We’ve done this a couple times before. For those unfamiliar, what we do is we go to the website Fanfic Maker, put in some parameters, and then auto-generate an entire story. We read the whole thing, and then rewrite the beginning, trying to stay as true to the original intent/spirit as possible.
As usual, the original story was very… unique. (You can read it here, just prepare yourself mentally first.)
Here’s what we came up with for the rewrite:
For the last stream’s exercise, we did something that we haven’t done in a while: edit auto-generated fanfiction.
To do that, we went to the website Fanfic Maker, put in some parameters, and then auto-generated an entire story. We read the whole thing, and then rewrote the beginning, trying to stay as true to the original intent/spirit as possible.
The original was very… unique. (You can read it here, just prepare yourself mentally first.) But it did have some interesting ideas, and a couple hilarious lines. So we did our best to incorporate them into the rewrite.
Here’s what we came up with:
For the last stream, we did something that we haven’t done in a while: rewriting the beginning to a viewer’s story.
When MetaWarrior shared their piece during the freeshare part of the previous stream, I thought it would be a perfect candidate for a writing makeover. It had potential, but it was a little vague and bland at the beginning. So we decided to rewrite it and spice it up!
To do this, we made sure to set the scene and tone right from the start, and to give the reader the who/what/when/where/hook as soon as possible. That way they could visualize what was going on, and want to continue reading.
Here’s what we came up with:
Today we started off the stream by doing something I’d been wanting to try for a while: re-writing a viewer-submitted story.
During out last stream, viewer QueenLavana submitted a story during freeshare that I thought would be an excellent candidate. It had potential, but the beginning was getting bogged down by backstory, was too quick in places, and left the reader not knowing what to feel. After getting their permission, we re-wrote the beginning during the exercise portion of the stream.
We made sure to pay attention to three things while re-writing: (1) giving the reader the who/what/when/where/why so that they can visualize and understand what’s going on, (2) showing the reader how how to feel by setting the tone, and (3) not being afraid to take it a little slow and set the scene.
Here’s what we came up with:
Last stream, along with special guest Abbey, we did one of my favorite exercises: editing auto-generated fanfiction. We did this last week and it was a lot of fun, so we decided to try it again this week.
We used the auto-generator Fanfic Maker, and just to give you a taste of what we were working with, here’s the beginning of the story we were given: (all spelling/punctuation mistakes left as-is)
