A few weeks ago National Geographic announced a writing contest on WattPad. Writers were invited to create short stories based on images of the harmful effects of pollution on sea life.
We thought it might be fun to enter. But of course, we’d have to leave the deciding of the story to Twitch chat!
Boring descriptions are boring. When writing a story, it’s important to not only engage your reader with the plot, setting, and characters, but also with the very words on the page.
If you’re not having fun describing something, your reader won’t have fun visualizing it!
WikiHow is one of the craziest places on the Internet, and that’s saying something. It has articles on literally everything, from How to Keep Your Glasses From Fogging Up to How to Calculate Pi by Throwing Frozen Hot Dogs. All with completely serious instructions and professional step-by-step illustrations.
So then what happens when we write a story about a random WikiHow article?
WikiHow is one of the craziest places on the Internet, and that’s saying something. It has articles on literally everything, from How to Keep Your Glasses From Fogging Up to How to Calculate Pi by Throwing Frozen Hot Dogs. All with completely serious instructions and professional step-by-step illustrations.
So then what happens when we write a story about a random WikiHow article?
For our latest stream, I wanted to induce something that most people try to avoid: writer’s block. After chat voted on a random sentence to start our writing exercise, I went with it and wrote half of a story, not knowing where I was going with it.
Then, just when I got to the point where I didn’t know what to write next, I stopped. That was my self-induced writer’s block. I couldn’t figure out what should happen next, and I could probably spend all day sitting there staring at the screen.
But instead of doing that, chat voted between three new random sentences, and the winning sentence immediately became the next sentence in our story. It was like taking a wrecking ball against a writer’s block wall, or de-clogging a writer’s block pipe… whichever metaphor you prefer.
Here’s the story I wrote, with the randomly-chosen first sentence and writer’s-block-destroying sentences in bold:
