Since today was special guest Abbey’s last day to join the stream for a while, we decided to make it special.
Instead of writing a new story, we looked over all of the stories we’d written over the past two weeks and narrowed it down to the three we liked best. Then we held a vote in the chat to see which one we would write a sequel to.
The three choices were these:
#1. Christmas curse
#2. Dragon kidnaps a prince by mistake
#3. Hamurai the hamster samurai
In the end, the winner was…
For the last writing stream (along with special guest Abbey), we tried something new.
For our writing exercise, we used the Japanese “Poop Kanji Book” to get some random sentences. In the book, every Japanese character (kanji) is given three example sentences that uses it, each of which (of course) involves poop.
After getting a random page number, we opened to the page with the kanji for “corner.” The chat voted on which of the three poop-sentences would start our story, and this is what we wrote: (bold sentence was our “random” sentence)
Over the past couple streams, whenever we browsed the Writing Prompts Subreddit, lots of people in chat would suggest even better ideas for prompts than the ones we were choosing from.
So for our most recent stream (with special guest Abbey), we decided to go ahead and create our own writing prompt, and then write it.
To help with that, we came up with a formula for creating a good prompt: normal idea plus twist equals prompt. For example, robots take over the world (normal idea) plus ducks (the twist) equal the prompt: “A.I. robots have taken over the world but have formed a pact with one species: ducks.”
This was a good exercise not only to come up with a prompt, but also for any story you want to write. We’ve all read sci-fi adventures, time travel mishaps, and romance drama novels before, so having a good twist to hook the reader can really make your story stand out.
After coming up with a bunch of fun prompts, we narrowed it down to these three:
Our last stream (with special guest Abbey) was on New Year’s Day, so we decided to ham it up as our theme and use it as our muse.
For our first writing exercise, we started off with a vote for the chat to pick which New Year’s topic we should write about (“a New Year’s Eve party” won), and we got a randomly-generated sentence to begin it with.
It was probably the hardest opening sentence we’ve had yet, but I’m happy with where it ended up. You can read what we wrote here: (the bold sentence is the randomly-generated sentence we had to start with)
Well Christmas is over, so that means it’s time to write about the harsh, sobering realities of the season that we wake up to with a hangover the day after Christmas.
For our writing exercise last stream (along with my special guest Abbey), we gave the chat five “miserable Christmas happenings” to choose from, and “drunk uncle” won by a hair. After brainstorming a bunch of ways we could write about a drunk uncle, we went with the most interesting one: writing from the drunk uncle’s point of view.
Here’s what we wrote:
