As you learn more about writing, you find out there’s this thing called “voice.”
It’s essentially the personality of the main character/narrator coming through the words on the page, directly to the reader, making them sound as real as possible.
Voice can be tricky to pin down, but there’s one book that does an incredible job of capturing the protagonist’s voice from page one: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green.
When Abbey and I heard that our friends from the U.S. Ali and Rohma would be coming to Tokyo over winter vacation, we knew that we were going to meet up with them.
But there was one problem: Tokyo is pretty far away from where we live in Gifu. And since the bullet train is pretty expensive, we had to go by bus.
That meant only one thing — night bus to Tokyo!
Have you ever written something and cried your eyes out, only to share it with someone else and they don’t have the same reaction?
What did you do wrong? Why didn’t they have the same emotional response that you did?
Maybe your sad story was missing one of the four crucial steps to make your reader cry!
As you may expect, it’s hard to find good pizza in Japan. And even if you do find good pizza, chances are it’s going to cost you. The average price of a single large delivery pizza from places nearby us ranges from $20 to $40!
When Abbey and I first came to Japan years ago in Okinawa, as pizzaficionados we were heartbroken.
…until we learned about a magical place called Shakey’s!
It’s hard to eat low carb in Japan. Rice is everywhere, miso soup made my eyes bulge when I first saw how high the carb count was, and pretty much every other dish is fried, covered in sauce, or has a hidden potato in their just waiting to jump out and surprise you.
It’s hard… but it’s not impossible! One treat that Abbey and I love to make is almond flour pancakes. They’re easy, very low carb, and most importantly, absolutely delicious.
And best of all, they can be made in Japan. So LET’S GET COOKING!
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:
