I am blessed to have other creative, talented writers in my friend group. Every month, we meet up for Write Night, a time for encouragement, honest feedback, and, best of all, writing challenges! In this week’s blog, I talk about some of the activities we’ve done or are planning to do. I’m hosting Write Night this month, so I have a few tricks in my notebook.
Randomized Short Stories
On slips of paper, we wrote character traits, problems, and genres or settings, creating three separate pools. Then we each drew two and kept one from each pool. (We couldn’t keep our own!) For example, I drew "gothic" as my setting, "overpopulation" as my problem, and "reckless" as my character trait. We gave ourselves only thirty minutes to write a short story of at least 500 words based on our random prompts. Shockingly, they came out great! We read our stories aloud and then went around the room saying one thing we liked about each one and one thing we thought could be improved upon. For the second round, we upped the randomness. We drew slips the same way but then handed the set off to someone else in the group, meaning we could give each other crazy combinations.
One Prompt
On another occasion, we all based our thirty-minute stories on a single prompt: “Someone finds a hidden door.” It’s fascinating to see where different minds go with the same prompt. One member of the group had a door through time; another wrote an allegory about passing through death’s door. After reading our stories, we offered each other feedback.
Switching Authors
This is the activity I have been most excited to try with the group. Everyone will start a story and put three tidbits of information below the story: the name of the protagonist, the type of lifeform the character is, and the character’s objective. At set intervals, everyone will switch seats and pick up where the previous writer left off. We will only be allowed to read the last line and the three bits of information, so, hopefully, the stories will morph in surprising ways. It’s like the telephone game where the original message becomes wildly distorted by the end of it.
Character Builders Vs. World Builders
For my other idea, I will divide the group in half. We will all listen to the same song, but half of us will develop settings based on it, and the other half will write character sketches. We will then write thirty-minute stories about someone else’s character in a different member’s world. I’m hoping to combine the best elements of our simpler activities.
Keep your eyes peeled, readers: I might publish stories that have come out of our Write Nights soon.
