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: Demons/Devils
Thirty prompts enter the arena, but only one can leave with the glory.
The glory of being written.
How do you start a book that takes place in a world that’s different from our own?
It’s a deceptively difficult question. If you just throw the reader right into a different world, then they’re going to be confused. But if you explain too much to them, they’re going to get bored.
To find one good answer, let’s take a look at a book that does it very well: Scythe by Neal Shusterman.
Sometimes you have an idea for a story but don’t know where to take it, or you have a chapter that’s killing you, or you just have no idea how to even start.
That’s where the Story Surgeon comes in! On the stream, I asked viewers to submit any stories they had that were on life support and in need of emergency operation. We’d take a look at them, operate, and prescribe some medication.
The first Story Surgeon patient was kittyashley, who only had a couple ideas and didn’t know how to turn them into a developed outline/plot.
Thankfully, that’s exactly what the story surgeon specializes in!
When writing a story, sometimes you need to zoom in on important things. You need to paint a specific image of an object in the reader’s mind. But other times you need to zoom out, not wasting time describing something specifically when there’s other, important stuff going on.
Part of writing a good story is knowing when to zoom in and out, and also how to zoom in and out. Thankfully there’s an easy way to remember with the five levels of description.
For the last stream, we did something we haven’t done in a while. We did an exercise not based on writing a story, but instead focused on a part of writing.
This time, we focused on similes. We went over what makes a good siile, a bad simile, and then came up with some examples of our own.
Here’s what we came up with:
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:
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, with special guest Abbey, we did something we haven’t done in a while: come up with our own writing prompt, then write it.
To do 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.”
After coming up with a bunch of fun prompts, chat voted on this one: “A bubble gum company sets up a golf game between Satan and Godzilla in order to get free advertisements but there’s a troll dentist nearby who isn’t happy about it cuz they didn’t solve his riddle first.”
Oh boy. Here’s what we came up with:
For the last stream, we did something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while: create the Ten Writing Commandments.
I’d put it off until we as a stream had written and read enough material for me to feel comfortable writing them up. I jotted down a few ideas before the stream started, but as always, chat was the real star with their suggestions.
After a long brainstorming session with good discussions and questions, we wrote our Ten Commandments.
Here’s what we came up with: