Round 1 | Part 3: Submission of Entry
It had been a long journey, spanning a few months, with this challenge that was going on. I am happy to announce just today, that I have finished completing a story that links 5 randomly generated keywords together: Fossil, Continuation, Performance, Pasture, Pardon
The process
There were 3 stages that I devised to complete the challenge.
The first was some brainstorming that I did by looking up the definitions of the keywords and their related images to find out what kind of ideas I could draw from them. This was shared in my very first story creation challenge post.
The second stage was to come up with a rough draft for whatever story I am planning in mind. It was then that I set the theme for the story to be based on a virtual reality online game in a futuristic, dystopian world. You can see the results of the draft of my first chapter here.
The third stage was to firm up the story as I create more chapters and narratives and connect the dots outlined in my story. For the later few chapters, I drew up an outline of how the stories would progress before starting on crafting the paragraphs for each chapter.
The difficulties
Most of the time, the actual story I am writing would turn out to be very different from my drafts. I found out that the more time I spend thinking about the story, the more new ideas I would churn out. These would add additional plot twists into my story, making it much longer than I had expected.
I realised I started with a cliffhanger, and ended this round of the challenge with a cliffhanger. I am not sure whether this would annoy the readers too much, but I just wanted to use this chance to try out new things.
The story might not be exactly coherent, grammatically sound or as excellent as writers who have more experience or are more professional than me. I tried to use a more personal writing style in order to make the story feel less dull and more relatable, but it could have been more consistent.
The decisions
As the story is taking longer than I had expected, I have decided to serialise the story that I am writing on. The series will be called "Free Frontiers", named after the game that was the focus of this story. Any updates, reflections, spin-offs and progress would still be notified to all interested readers via this blog, but the main story, together with future versions and chapters, will be found in the same document as the above link.
This also means that the nature of future story creation challenges will change. Instead of just coming out a story from a collection of keywords, I am thinking of venturing into different genres, or create something based on actual events!
Look forward to Round 2, which will stretch my creativity and writing skills even further!
Meanwhile, the Free Frontiers series will continue, but it may not necessarily be included in future story creation challenges, so I can spend more time thinking about how I want to develop this series.
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