KICKSTART YOUR WRITING: TRYING NEW THINGS TO FUEL YOUR WRITING
Welcome to the Wattpad Workshop Series!
Start anytime.
These are free workshops for Wattpad writers who want to be inspired and challenged. You’ll come away with new ideas, new techniques and, most importantly, you’ll generate lots of new writing. The workshops run every Monday on the Wattpad Blog.
To join in: read the post and get writing – post your writing on the Weekly Workshop Series Discussion Thread!
The workshops are run by Alice Kuipers, bestselling author of Life on the Refrigerator Door, The Worst Thing She Ever Did and 40 Things I Want To Tell You. Visit her at www.alicekuipers.com:
Week 23 (Missed the earlier writer’s workshop? Check the links at the end for every single one!)
With Halloween upon us, this week’s workshop has to be all about the spooky night. It’ll help us remember that writing is fun. Sometimes as writers we focus too much on end goals, such as publication, or finally finishing the project we’re writing. But writing should be, above all, fun. Enjoying getting words on the page is the first step in a very long, challenging process. So, we’re going to have a little fun with writing this week by looking at writing a Half-Minute Horror story!
This is a project I took part in a couple of years ago, as did a bunch of very cool and brilliant authors including Lemony Snicket, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman and Joyce Carol Oates. The weblink is here if you’re interested in sharing your final result or reading some other half-minute horrors.
The idea is that you write a story that is spooky, scary, (totally in the Halloween mode, hey), that can be read in half a minute. You’d be amazed at how tricky it can be to get down a whole story, hopefully with a spine-tingling twist, so it takes up less than a page or two. Taken from their website, here’s a Half-Minute Horror by the wonderful Margaret Atwood. As you can see, it’s brilliant, swift, and chilling. A whole story using hardly any words at all. I’ve included it here so you can see what can be done with this idea:
This week’s writing prompt:
Now it’s your turn: I’d love to see what you come up with if you dare this week. Write your own Half-Minute Horror.
Post your responses here at the Weekly Workshop Series Discussion Thread! I’ll read and give feedback as often as I can.
Here are the links to the first 22 workshops if you want to check those out too:
1: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/23941414637/welcome-to-the-wattpad-workshop-series
2: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/24410490610/wattpad-workshop-series-week-2
3: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/24901511492/wattpad-workshop-series-week-3
4: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/25371027489/wattpad-workshop-series-week-4
5: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/25857539960/wattpad-workshop-series-week-5
6: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/26345198488/wattpad-workshop-series-week-6
7: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/26846380786/wattpad-workshop-series-week-7
8: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/27328608969/wattpad-workshop-week-8
9: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/27831588118/wattpad-workshop-series-week-9
10: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/28342515943/wattpad-workshop-series-week-10
11: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/28871090569/wattpad-workshop-series-week-11
12: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/29338336595/wattpad-workshop-series-week-12
13: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/29825511068/wattpad-workshop-series-week-13
14: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/30313037021/wattpad-workshop-series-week-14
15: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/30795446512/wattpad-workshop-series-week-15
16: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/31268153721/wattpad-workshop-series-week-16
17: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/31749168226/wattpad-workshop-series-week-17
18: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/32212063112/wattpad-workshop-series-week-18
19: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/32683217752/wattpad-workshop-series-week-19
20: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/33233512028/wattpad-workshop-series-week-20
21: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/33639444606/wattpad-workshop-series-week-21
22: http://blog.wattpad.com/post/34095858667/wattpad-workshop-series-week-22