I'm a part of my institution's writing club, the Scribes. It's not always particularly structured, but it's a lot of fun. Usually we start with a round of introductions, with one random fact (last time, it was favourite poem or song lyrics) since the same people don't tend to show up for every meeting.
From there, we can branch out anywhere. Most times we include an open session to just share ideas—I've put Macbay Transportation Services out there to get the idea an actual war is starting up aside from all of the empire stuff—but it's also neat to see what some of the others are doing. One girl just asked for help with one point of the plot she couldn't get past, and, while I wasn't useful at all in that one, I think we as a group helped a lot.
The idea-sharing is actually where I got the idea for The Long and Winding Road. One boy (I don't know why I'm referring to all of the members as children) decided to sort of jump on the zombie bandwagon, but to him it's not horror if it's not cannibalism, so he threw the idea at us that eating zombie flesh is the cure for zombieism. Another boy ran off with that and started a beautiful comedic idea for something set a while past the apocalypse featuring a zombie restaurant. My focus has kind of slipped away from the original, but I got both of the boys' permission and started up that fiction.
Aside from that, we do a lot of funny writing exercises. Some involve coming up with a plot when given a title. We get about five minutes and then share with the others. Invariably someone will come up with something involving either the Mafia or the total breakdown of society (apparently we might be anarchists). We've done one where we're given a plot and had to come up with the cast (or at least one character).
This week's exercise is the first time we've been given "homework," just because we ran out of time at the meeting. We all had to come up with two "themes" (we used that term quite loosely, as you will see), a setting, and a main character. We then randomly picked a character, a setting, and two themes, and we need to have a rough idea of the storyline by next week. I ended up having to write a 20-year-old female university student moonlighting as a sports team mascot, set in sixth-century Constantinople, with themes of revenge and flying time monkeys.
If nothing else, it's going to be interesting.
Sounds like fun! I'd really suck at that kind of thing - I'm awful at trying to think up stories on a whim, I have to take a reaaallly long time planning it all out before I can actually get anywhere. I have no idea how you came up with or are going to write that prompt at the end, but it sounds utterly amazing. XD
ReplyDelete"Invariably someone will come up with something involving either the Mafia or the total breakdown of society..."
That sounds so much like something you'd be a part of, Journey. XD
Well, the things I threw into the pot of randomness were a French-Canadian lumberjack (a character made earlier by another member) for the protagonist, a series of underground caves for the setting, and flying time monkeys and I forget what else for theme. I'm not entirely sure how the flying time monkeys came up, but it was that very meeting, with some sort of overlapping of conversations. Now I must pay for it, ha.
DeleteI know, eh?