Writing a monster that’s actually scary to read is not easy.
So let’s go over some examples of terrifying monsters from books, talk about why they work, then practice writing some of our own together!
Tag: Aliens
“You have such a way with words,” I say, squeezing some more fly corpses off my tongue.
You’ve enjoyed the power of stopping time your entire life.
You have as much free time as you want to work on projects, relax, and even catch up on sleep.
But then, one day, when you try to start time again… it doesn’t work.
Creating a compelling character that embodies traits you like is easy. You can make them the underdrog, struggling against oppression, and overcoming conflict to eventually emerge victorious.
But what about the villains? The antagonists that you hate? How can you make sure that they don’t come across as a cardboard-cutout-plot-point who exists for no other reason than to get in the way of your protagonist?
The answer is simple: make them human.
A speedrun for a video game is where you try to get through the game as fast as possible. Good speedrunners can complete games in mere minutes, where it would take a normal player hours, or even days to finish.
So then what would a “writing speedrun” look like? Today, we find out!
For the last stream’s exercise, we tried out a new exercise: using the Japanese book “Unfortunate Animals” for inspiration.
“Unfortunate Animals” is the name of a book series that’s popular in Japan, where every page has an “unfortunate” fact about animals. For example, most firelies can’t light up, or eels are only black because they’re sunburned, or rhinos’ horns are actually warts.
For the exercise, we opened up to three random pages, translated the “unfortunate” fact, and then chat picked which one we’d write about. They voted on this one: Cows produce 180 liters of drool per day.
Here’s what we came up with:
For the last stream’s exercise, we did an exercise about overcoming writer’s block.
There are many different types of writer’s block, though most people use it to mean “not knowing where to take the story next.”
It turns out the best way to beat writer’s block is to, well, write! It doesn’t matter if it’s good or if it makes sense, quite often just getting something down on the page will get the juices flowing.
To show that off, we induced writer’s block on ourselves. Chat came up with an opening sentence, then we wrote half a story, and stopped (that’s when we got “writer’s block”). To unclog the block, we got a random sentence that had to be the next sentence in our story, then we had to finish it to the end.
Here’s what we came up with:
For the last stream’s exercise, we tried something new for the exercise section: writing a story with way too much description.
Balancing description is hard. It’s easy to slip into describing too much or too little. Walking the delicate line between the two is hard.
So for the stream, we purposefully wrote a story with too much description, then went back and edited it so that it was more concise.
Chat voted for a topic, the first sentence, and then it was off to the races to make it is overly/unnecessarily detailed as possible.
Here’s the original and the rewrite that we came up with:
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:
For the latest stream we went back to one of our favorite writing exercises: randomly-generated sentences.
They’re a perfect way to work out your creativity muscles, and worst comes to worst, if your story sucks, hey, you can just blame the terrible random sentences!
Chat voted between three random sentences to start our story, and we wrote about half a page. Then we got another random sentence and had to use it as the next sentence in our story. Then we wrote another half a page and got a final random sentence, which would be our ending sentence that we had to write to.
Needless to say, it was pretty chaotic. But thanks to some awesome suggestions from chat, I absolutely love where our story ended up.
You can read it here: (the randomly-generated sentences are in bold)