One good creative writing exercise is writing with a stipulation, something like, you can’t use the letter “a,” or you have to write a story with a sentient bag of chips.
One good creative writing form of torture is writing a story with FIVE stipulations!
My book Metl: The ANGEL Weapon is coming out this Tuesday,March 5th!
To celebrate, each stream leading up to the release will be about my process writing and/or publishing the book.
So let’s go over one of the most frustrating parts of the journey: rewriting the opening over and over.
If you only ever read one article on improving your writing, make it this one.
This is one of the easiest, quickest ways to improve your writing skills.
All it takes is a little… murder.
One of the most fun ways to play card games is by “drafting.”
You get packs of random cards, pick one card you like, pass the rest to people sitting with you, and repeat until all the cards are gone. Then you use what you picked to build a deck.
So if drafting cards is so much fun, would it be possible to “draft” a story?
Church bells are ringing. Elves are singing. Donkeys are braying for joy.
Shrek and Santa Claus are getting married!
…there’s only one problem: they can’t use the letter “E” to tell their story.
“As Yams McKenzie set down his bulbous, starchy body on the surface of the moon, he remembered his days as just a sprout in the ground.”
A speedrun for a video game is where you try to get through the game as fast as possible. Good speedrunners can complete games in mere minutes, where it would take a normal player hours, or even days to finish.
So then what would a “writing speedrun” look like? Today, we find out!
3rd person past tense? “He said/she ran?” Yawn. Been there, done that, it’s been written a billion times.
1st person present tense? “I say/I run?” Enh. Every young adult book does this nowadays.
2nd person future tense? “You will say/you will run?” …now you’re writing with fire, baby!
As a writer, you’ll often be given word-count restrictions. Maybe 2,000 words, or 500 words…
…or sometimes, even 30 words. Could you write a story with only 30 words?
We tried, and here’s the results!
It turns out that all this time, McDonald’s wasn’t actually a restaurant. It was a long-term experiment to find how gradually they could kill people while getting paid for it.
And when the truth leaked to the public…
