Once Upon a Time, Dr. Seuss and H. P. Lovecraft Met at a Bar
Or, Strange Things from Today's Stream: the Accidental Story.
I’m not just a world-builder, I’m also a storyteller and a Twitch streamer. On my streams, I talk about world-building, and then we do writing sprints, or what I usually call work blocks. I set a timer (usually 20-25 minutes), and I write while chat also writes or folds laundry or chops veggies for dinner or whatever. The point is you take a task and you focus on it for what feels like an incredibly short time, and then you marvel at how much progress you’ve made when the timer goes off.
You may recognize it as the Pomodoro Technique.
Well, today, one of my regular viewers had “had a day.” You know the ones, nothing is really going wrong so much as everything is just…annoying. You hit every light on the way home, only to find that the entrance to your street is blocked by an accident. That kind of day. This viewer was having trouble deciding what to write because of it.
I made a couple of colorful metaphors, and finally issued a challenge: “We’re going to set a 10-minute timer and just shit out a turd of words. If you need more of a framework than that, try and write like Dr. Seuss.” Just as a funny little challenge, something that didn’t mean anything, something that would open up the creative thinking pathways in our brains.
I was so tickled by my own idea, I decided to try it myself! I started the timer and began writing.
About three-and-a-half minutes in, I realized I’d completely failed the assignment. I kept typing. I was laughing so hard I was nearly crying. I kept typing.
With a little over two minutes to spare, I finished. I was near hysterical with laughter. While I had failed to write like Dr. Seuss, I had managed to tell a complete horror story in the style of Dr. Seuss.
And I had done so in under eight minutes.1
My friends, I present to you: If H. P. Lovecraft and Dr. Seuss Got Drunk & Built a World. Don’t forget to drop it a like while you’re there (at the bottom of the article, on the left)!
Watch the video and see it happen in real time. Skip to 00:37:00, and just…witness the magic there on screen.)
That writing is a MASTERPIECE, what are you saying??? 😁