Yesterday's 1000 words went to Hashtag Basketball, so I'm three for three. Today is feeling a little tougher, so today I'm going to try something different. At home I have something called "Story Cubes," which are 6-sided dice with an image on each side. The idea is that you roll the dice and make up a story using all nine words. Typically you start with "Once upon a time..." It's somewhere between a party game and a creative activity.
Since I'm at work (on a slow day) and the dice are at home, I'm going to use a 9-word generation from RandomWordGenerator.com and make up a story. This should be weird. I'm setting the max number of syllables per word at 4.
Here's the list: Story, translate, popular, smell, bloody, rule, authorise (with an S?! I'm gonna change that), variation, volunteer.
The goal will be to start typing in a moment and create the entire story in one fell swoop, but if a student comes in, I'll have to pause.
Ready? Go.
Once upon a time there was a chubby cat named Ted. Ted lived in a house with two other cats, two dogs, a guinea pig, three hamsters, and four humans. It was a full house, if ever there was one. What separated Ted from the rest of the group was that he had come from an animal shelter, which made his story a little more complex. You see, due to his time at the shelter - and it was a longer time than he wanted it to be - Ted learned to communicate with all of the other animals instead of just cats.
Ted could talk with dogs. He could tweet with birds. He could make those weird sounds that rabbits make. Best of all, he could translate between them so they could all become friends with each other.
This special skill went mostly unnoticed by the workers and volunteers at the animal shelter, although it did always seem like Ted was able to calm down other animals when he walked by their cages. The staff wondered if it was his smell or if he was just a naturally popular guy.
Whatever the reason, Ted was adored by everyone at the shelter. There were many occasions where Ted looked like he was going to find a forever home, but there would be some kind of hang-up before the process was completed. In one case, the staff wasn't sure that the person who wanted him would actually make a good home for such an outgoing cat, and they refused to authorize the transaction. It caused a bit of a stir, but Ted wasn't bothered by the whole thing. He carried right on playing middleman for all of the other animals at the shelter and treating them all like family.
One day a woman named Leslie came into the shelter to see her friends. She had been a volunteer there up until two years earlier - about three months after Ted was born. As she wandered around and chatted with her friends, she asked to play with some of the cats. Ted was among the group, but she didn't notice him right away. Instead she let the cats claw all over her, climbing up her back, wrestling with her feet, and chewing on her fingers. The result was a bloody sleeve but a happy animal lover.
Then Leslie noticed Ted. She had no intention of going home with an animal, but Ted had been there so long that she wondered if he ought to finally have a nice home of his own. She notified the staff with a hand-written letter that read "I am making it a rule: If no one adopts Ted by the end of this month, he is mine. And if anyone comes in and considers him, let me know."
The rest of the month went at a snail's pace for Ted. Everyone looked at him, wondering whether he was really going to leave. He did his best to keep calm - no mood variation, no change to his diet, nothing.
Two days before the month ended, the shelter had a surprise visitor: Leslie again. She decided she couldn't wait any longer and would take Ted immediately. The animals rejoiced!
Imagine Ted's surprise when he got to her house and realized that he could play middleman with all of these new animals! He could translate the absurd guinea pig sounds, the squeak of the hamsters, the barks of the dogs, and even the bizarre grumblings of the standard house cat.
Everyone loved him. And they would love him forever.
END
Alright. That wasn't so bad. Probably not my best work, but an uninterrupted word-generator story in ten minutes.
There's something exhilarating about not knowing where a story is going to go. It's a weird surprise to yourself, and I'll confess that I wasn't sure where any of that would end up after about two paragraphs and I'm not sure it was anywhere useful, but that's OK. This is one of those things that is hard to describe, but it feels really cool while it's happening and then often feels ridiculous or uninteresting to look back on.
Maybe that's writing though. You write something, experience it in the form you meant for it at the time, and then it's gone. The reader is free to interpret it how they want, but the writer can never see it in the same light. It's art. It's fleeting. It should be.
As I close in on 1,000 words here, I wonder what route this will take tomorrow. I can't promise any particular type of writing on any given day. It goes as the mood strikes me. So I guess wish me luck*? Maybe it'll be about the NBA. It'll probably be about the NBA.
*No one is reading this anyway.
Since I'm at work (on a slow day) and the dice are at home, I'm going to use a 9-word generation from RandomWordGenerator.com and make up a story. This should be weird. I'm setting the max number of syllables per word at 4.
Here's the list: Story, translate, popular, smell, bloody, rule, authorise (with an S?! I'm gonna change that), variation, volunteer.
The goal will be to start typing in a moment and create the entire story in one fell swoop, but if a student comes in, I'll have to pause.
Ready? Go.
Once upon a time there was a chubby cat named Ted. Ted lived in a house with two other cats, two dogs, a guinea pig, three hamsters, and four humans. It was a full house, if ever there was one. What separated Ted from the rest of the group was that he had come from an animal shelter, which made his story a little more complex. You see, due to his time at the shelter - and it was a longer time than he wanted it to be - Ted learned to communicate with all of the other animals instead of just cats.
Ted could talk with dogs. He could tweet with birds. He could make those weird sounds that rabbits make. Best of all, he could translate between them so they could all become friends with each other.
This special skill went mostly unnoticed by the workers and volunteers at the animal shelter, although it did always seem like Ted was able to calm down other animals when he walked by their cages. The staff wondered if it was his smell or if he was just a naturally popular guy.
Whatever the reason, Ted was adored by everyone at the shelter. There were many occasions where Ted looked like he was going to find a forever home, but there would be some kind of hang-up before the process was completed. In one case, the staff wasn't sure that the person who wanted him would actually make a good home for such an outgoing cat, and they refused to authorize the transaction. It caused a bit of a stir, but Ted wasn't bothered by the whole thing. He carried right on playing middleman for all of the other animals at the shelter and treating them all like family.
One day a woman named Leslie came into the shelter to see her friends. She had been a volunteer there up until two years earlier - about three months after Ted was born. As she wandered around and chatted with her friends, she asked to play with some of the cats. Ted was among the group, but she didn't notice him right away. Instead she let the cats claw all over her, climbing up her back, wrestling with her feet, and chewing on her fingers. The result was a bloody sleeve but a happy animal lover.
Then Leslie noticed Ted. She had no intention of going home with an animal, but Ted had been there so long that she wondered if he ought to finally have a nice home of his own. She notified the staff with a hand-written letter that read "I am making it a rule: If no one adopts Ted by the end of this month, he is mine. And if anyone comes in and considers him, let me know."
The rest of the month went at a snail's pace for Ted. Everyone looked at him, wondering whether he was really going to leave. He did his best to keep calm - no mood variation, no change to his diet, nothing.
Two days before the month ended, the shelter had a surprise visitor: Leslie again. She decided she couldn't wait any longer and would take Ted immediately. The animals rejoiced!
Imagine Ted's surprise when he got to her house and realized that he could play middleman with all of these new animals! He could translate the absurd guinea pig sounds, the squeak of the hamsters, the barks of the dogs, and even the bizarre grumblings of the standard house cat.
Everyone loved him. And they would love him forever.
END
Alright. That wasn't so bad. Probably not my best work, but an uninterrupted word-generator story in ten minutes.
There's something exhilarating about not knowing where a story is going to go. It's a weird surprise to yourself, and I'll confess that I wasn't sure where any of that would end up after about two paragraphs and I'm not sure it was anywhere useful, but that's OK. This is one of those things that is hard to describe, but it feels really cool while it's happening and then often feels ridiculous or uninteresting to look back on.
Maybe that's writing though. You write something, experience it in the form you meant for it at the time, and then it's gone. The reader is free to interpret it how they want, but the writer can never see it in the same light. It's art. It's fleeting. It should be.
As I close in on 1,000 words here, I wonder what route this will take tomorrow. I can't promise any particular type of writing on any given day. It goes as the mood strikes me. So I guess wish me luck*? Maybe it'll be about the NBA. It'll probably be about the NBA.
*No one is reading this anyway.
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