Story Creation Challenge Round 3: Three months of events to celebrate the joy of writing

 

STORY CREATION CHALLENGE: ROUND 3

Round 3: new format, new surprises!

After half a year of break, the Story Creation Challenge is back with Round 3! Months of conceptualisation went into this, and I am excited to reveal the events that are going to happen under this challenge.

Initially, I wanted to give myself three weeks for a round of challenge. However, I may be too pressed for time to be able to deliver quality content, so why not let this challenge be three months long instead? Within these three months, I am going to bring in lots of fun ideas to try out and to sharpen my creative writing skills.

There will be one event per month, so there will be plenty of writing to do!

March 2021: Spring Equinox celebration - The WrAIter’s Challenge

With the season that brings us life comes forth new ideas to enliven all sorts of stories. This challenge is for the one who is troubled by writer’s block and desires for a constant flow of inspiration in one’s stories.

How does it work? Simply write out a coherent story using a cheat, that is any artificially intelligent (AI) programme that responds to whatever you write. Such programmes are indispensable in creating your own text-based role-playing games.

For me, I will be trying out world-building and exploring a genre that I am mostly unfamiliar with to challenge my creativity to the greatest extent possible. The “AI Dungeon” app allows me to do this. I cannot wait how it’s AI programme will surprise me!

April 2021: Sequel Writing Event - Arc 2 of the Free Frontiers world

I must confess that it was presumptuous of me to call a mere five chapters a “book”, and I think it will be more appropriate to call it an “arc”, as with  how it works in popular culture.

The theme for the second arc is the resolving of a crisis. After being trapped in an enigmatic parallel world within a game that smells of danger, Garner will attempt to clear the quest in that world and unearth some of the troublesome truths that underlie virtual reality.

I shall name the second arc as “Escape from Ophelia’s Dreams”.

Some of my plans for this arc are inspired by the “Chaos;Child” anime. The philosophies and views expressed in this anime can give me some sort of direction for the story of this arc.

May / June 2021: Birthday Special - new blog post series on local tourism 

Recently, I have spent much time exploring the various attractions around my country of Singapore, where I have had various experiences and takeaways. Under this series, I will share my exploits and my thoughts on them.

This series is also significant to me because it is also a way for me to test out new ways of how I use the blog. With this series as a launchpad, I hope to explore the possibility of using the blog more as my personal diary than its being a scrapbook of whatever interesting things I find on the Internet. I also intend for the blog content to be more bite-sized and fragmented, much unlike its wordy predecessor.

It also ties in with my birthday, which marks the anniversary of my revitalisation of the blog. That one-year mark is a good opportunity for me to look back at what I have done, and how I could further improve on what I do for the blog.

Story Creation Challenge Round 1 | Part 3: Submission of entry

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 completed story can be found in this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQaqquDFrQzVXvUY0oG8k1_g1HfdKJNd0C1uDzH2CquHSJYbMtL2v3TWdbaGQCdHrFFI_vxSehcmBCU/pub 

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.