Many beginner writers think that “editing” means running spell check, grammar check, changing a few words, and then calling it a day.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth!
Editing is a long, long road paved with blood, tears and sweat.
Tag: Poop
Sometimes when you’re writing a story, your characters can all seem to blend and congeal together. Their opinions, reactions, and personality start to become indistinguishable from each other.
But don’t let that happen! Different characters with different perspectives and attitudes are exactly what make stories great.
If you want to make sure that your characters are coming through strong, clear, and different from each other, then there’s an easy way to test it out: write a conversation between them using dialogue only.
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:
Since we’ve been trying out a lot of new exercises recently, for the last stream we went back to the classics: the poop book.
For the “poop book” exercise, we 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. We’ve done it a couple times before, always producing hilarious results.
This time, we opened up to the kanji for “combine/group,” and this is the sentence chat voted for: “If you and I combine our powers, then we’ll be able to create even more amazing poops!”
What a crappy starting point! Here’s what we came up with:
After the ten stream streak of the Rubbish to Published series, last stream finally marked us going back to our roots during the writing exercise section: random sentences.
Random sentences are a great way to give your creativity a workout. And thankfully we have a great source of them: the kanji poop book.
We’ve gotten some “crappy inspiration” from the poop book before, and it turned out great. This time, we opened up to a random page, getting the kanji for “tea” and three poop-themed sentences to choose from.
The chat voted on which of the three poop-sentences would start our story, and this is what we wrote: (bold sentence was our “random” sentence, “brown” is “tea-colored” in Japanese.)
For the last writing stream (along with special guest Abbey), we tried something new.
For our writing exercise, we used the Japanese “Poop Kanji Book” to get some random sentences. In the book, every Japanese character (kanji) is given three example sentences that uses it, each of which (of course) involves poop.
After getting a random page number, we opened to the page with the kanji for “corner.” The chat voted on which of the three poop-sentences would start our story, and this is what we wrote: (bold sentence was our “random” sentence)