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Category: Dark Humor

When an Old Lady Pays for Her Mountain of Groceries by Check

When an Old Lady Pays for Her Mountain of Groceries by Check

Published by Scott on May 11, 2018

For the last stream, we tried a new exercise: taking a mundane/miserable activity and writing it in an interesting way.

Stories aren’t always about explosions and aliens; sometimes it’s good to have conflict, mystery, and vivid descriptions in the more mundane parts of life. That’s what this exercise was all about.

To do that, chat voted for a mundane activity, and then we wrote a story about it. They chose this one: Waiting in the checkout line while someone ahead of you pays by writing out a check.

Here’s what we came up with:

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Cooking up a Story Where Every Sentence Has a “Food Word”

Cooking up a Story Where Every Sentence Has a “Food Word”

Published by Scott on April 16, 2018

For the last stream’s exercise, we tried a new exercise: writing a story where every sentence has a food word in it.

This was suggested by viewer iWriteGooder, and I liked it because of its unique restriction.

Food words could be anything from food items themselves (“bread”) to metaphors using food (“egg him on”) to cooking terms (“boiling”), the only exception being puns (no “he tried to catch-up” or “won’t you lettuce try?” allowed).

As usual, chat voted for the opening sentences and then we went wild. Here’s what we came up with:

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Peeking Over at the Witch Next Door – Writing Stream Recap

Peeking Over at the Witch Next Door – Writing Stream Recap

Published by Scott on February 10, 2018

For the last stream’s exercise, we did something we hadn’t done in a while: writing using randomly-generated sentences.

While it may seem a bit silly to use randomly-generated sentences, they can actually make for good exercises. First, they force you to work your creative muscles. Second, they’re perfect for breaking writer’s block. And third, they help alleviate writing pressure, since if what you end up writing sucks, that’s fine; it was just a randomly-generated sentence anyway!

For our exercise, we started our story with a random sentence, wrote a bit, got another random sentence, wrote a bit, and then got a final random sentence to end the story that we had to write to. Here’s what we ended up with: (bolded sentences are the randomly-generated ones)

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Rubbish to Published: Creating characters – Writing Stream Recap

Rubbish to Published: Creating characters – Writing Stream Recap

Published by Scott on January 20, 2018

Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”

We picked out our audience and genre in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: creating our characters.

To do this, we created character profiles. For the three main characters in our story, we asked each of them the same questions (“What is their physical appearance?” “What are their strengths/weaknesses?” “What do they desire/fear?” and more).

You can see the profiles we can up with here:

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Rubbish to Published: Creating your idea toolbox – Writing Stream Recap

Rubbish to Published: Creating your idea toolbox – Writing Stream Recap

Published by Scott on January 15, 2018

Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”

We’d already come up with our story idea in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: creating an idea toolbox.

An idea toolbox is basically a bunch of brainstorming. You come up with lots and lots of ideas by following these steps:

#1. Ask a question about your story idea
#2. Write whatever answers pop into your head (you can have multiple, even contradictory answers!)
#3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you have about a page full of information
#4. Read through your page and pick out the parts that “spark emotion,” things that get you excited to write
#5. Compile all your favorite parts together, then go back to step 1

As always, chat came up with some great questions and answers based on the idea we came up with. Here’s where we finally ended up:

Continue readingRubbish to Published: Creating your idea toolbox – Writing Stream Recap