Story Creation Challenge Round 1 | Part 1: Introduction and brainstorming

Introduction to the Story Creation Challenge (SCC)

I want to make the content on my blog posts more exciting and enriching. There are two reasons for this: (1) I am getting serious about blogging, because the more obscure nature of the blogosphere enables me to stay true to myself instead of being pressured to write something sensational like in social media platforms. (2) Regretfully, I did not start my story-writing at the end of last year, so I felt like I needed to follow-up on the "A Sprouting Idea" post. 

To be able to write quality content, having a flair for writing and being creative in my use of words is necessary. This does not come easy, it requires many hours of thinking and training. My storytelling journey starts with a classic creativity exercise that many writers (and primary school students) do - craft a story out of a few random words. My take on this exercise will be the Story Creation Challenge, a series of posts on my blog where I play around with different ideas for creative writing and try out this challenge.

My task for Round 1 - using a random word generator, I have gotten my five keywords that I need for this challenge. I am to write a story that includes the following five words:
performance, fossil, pardon, pasture, continuation

Brainstorming Phase

First, I spent an hour brainstorming about the possible meanings and images that these words bring to mind. Using association and visualisation techniques, I have compiled a list of possible topics and scenarios that I may want to include in my stories. You can see these at work in my Google Slides here: