Happiness? Anger? Fear?
What makes ME feel these things for real?
Let’s find out by spinning the wheel then writing stories about whichever emotion it lands on!
Category: Real Life
Game of Thrones’s ending was bad. Lost’s ending was bad. The Soprano’s ending was bad. The list goes on and on.
But why do endings usually end up so unsatisfying? Why are they so hard to pull off?
Let’s find out!
With my mother still visiting me in Japan, I figured what better way to have her on the stream than by her writing about one of my most embarrassing memories.
What could possible go wrong?
They say it’s best to embrace your past, learn from it, and move on to live your best life.
So what better way to embrace your cringe-worthy childhood than by having a bunch of strangers write haiku poems about it?
They say it’s best to embrace your past, learn from it, and move on to live your best life.
So what better way to embrace your cringe-worthy past than by having a bunch of strangers write haiku poems about it?
They say it’s best to embrace your past, learn from it, and move on to live your best possible life.
So what better way to embrace your cringe-worthy past than by having a bunch of strangers write haiku poems about embarrassing college photos?
A few streams ago, we did an exercise where guest-star Abbey wrote a story and then I edited it. To get Abbey’s writing juices flowing, we had her write about an embarrassing life experience, and it worked pretty well.
This time, we did the same thing, with Abbey writing about another miserable experience: April Fool’s Gone Wrong. Since April Fool’s was just a few days ago, we wanted to get the story out there while it was still somewhat relevant.
Last time, Abbey’s first draft actually ended up surprisingly good, and we didn’t have to do much editing at all. This time around though, thankfully it was much more of a mess! We had plenty to work with.
Here’s Abbey’s original and our final edit:
For the last stream we tried an exercise we’d never done before: Abbey wrote a story, and then I edited it.
Since Abbey isn’t a very experienced writer, we decided to have her write about one of her most embarrassing life experiences — something that would get the writing juices flowing more easily. Abbey gave three to pick from, and chat voted for “the worst customer ever at Barnes and Noble.”
I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much from Abbey, but her first draft was pretty darn good. It had a bit of fat to trim and some transitions to add, but the emotion and vividness were all there. I was very impressed and didn’t have to do much editing at all!
Here’s what our final draft ended up as:
For the last stream, it was Valentine’s Day here in Japan, so we decided to have a love-filled stream.
For the exercise section, that meant dredging up memories from my past and writing about one of my worst dates ever. We’d done this before a few months ago, and it was a lot of fun; plus I still had plenty more bad dates to write about.
The chat voted between three choices, settling on “drug dealer surprise” as the story I’d write. It was a bit hard remembering all the details from high school, but I think I did a fairly good job:
I recently read the short story “Cat Person” in the New Yorker that has been getting a lot of attention online. It’s rare for a short short to go viral; anything that’s not a Twitter post, YouTube video, or Facebook image usually has no chance, so it’s great to see an interest in the medium spark up.
Since the story is more or less about a really bad date/relationship, it inspired the theme for our recent writing stream: what’s the worst date you’ve ever been on?
We started off with a fun exercise: get a sentence from a random sentence generator (yes they exist and they’re awesome), and then write a story about a date starting with that random sentence. We wrote for 10 minutes or so, and then we got another random sentence, which would become our ending sentence, forcing us to somehow complete the story toward it.
It was tough, but thanks to some suggestions from the chat, I liked where we ended up. You can read the story below: