Aches throughout history… is there nothing more worthy of humanity’s research?
George Washington’s legendary twisted ankle, Napoleon’s history-making lumbago, and the great mummies of Egypt that were really just suffering from sore glutes after doing squats all day in the sun.
Thankfully we have a dedicated team willing to devote their lives to studying these magnificent bodily defects: the ACHE-ologists!
For the last stream’s exercise, we went back to a classic exercise: the Japanese poop book.
We’ve done this exercise a couple times before. What we do is open up a Japanese kanji book to a random page, translate the poop-related example sentences for that kanji, and then chat picks one of them and we start a story with it.
This time, we opened up to the kanji for “meet,” and this is the sentence chat voted for: “At the exercise meet, I participated in the poop-carrying relay race.”
As always, hilarity ensued. Here’s what we came up with:
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)
Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We did our chapter-by-chapter plotting in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: picking our tense and POV.
Choosing whether you tell your story in the past or present tense, and whether in the first or third person, is a big decision. A lot of time writers don’t give it the attention it deserves, since choosing the right combination can enhance your story.
We went over the pros and cons of each tense and POV combination, giving examples from real books and stories too. There was a lot of information, but here’s what we came up with:
