Writing challenges

[Hannah Durante]

As a huge fan of various writing challenges myself, I thought I’d post two of the ones I’m most familiar with here, just in case anybody else might be interested in taking them on as well.

The first one is called several things –rapidfire, itunes shuffle, music shuffle, etc. Essentially it’s a self-prompted exercise that you do to music. You can either do this challenge by the rules, or without rules. Without rules just means you do it without the time limit. By the rules, means you play it like this:
1. Pick a character, fandom, pairing, friendship, whatever.

2. Put on your music program on shuffle/random and start playing songs.

3. For each song, write something inspired by the song related to the theme you chose earlier. You only have the song length. No pre-planning and no writing after the song is over. No skipping songs either.

4. Do 10 songs and post. Make sure to include the song name/artist.
And that’s all there is to it! Also in case anybody is wondering, yes crackpairings and just crack stuff is totally acceptable.

The other challenge is called the jukebox shuffle meme, at least it was on the sites I saw people do it on and participated in myself. This one is a little trickier, just because you need at least two people to be taking the challenge to do it properly. As to how it works, this is how you do it:
1.) You need at least two people to be taking the challenge, if you want to take it the way it was intended.
2.) Put your music player on shuffle, and write down the songs it gives you right away- pick anywhere from 5 to 25, depending on how much writing you want to do. Make sure to write them in list format!
3.) You make a thread where you post your list of songs, as well as indicate what your ‘theme’ is, or what you want prompts for (like if you wanted to write pirate101, just tell people you want pirate101 prompts). Also make sure to indicate what you are and are not comfortable with doing, as well as any canon chars you like to write with and don’t like to write with. You also post a prompting format based upon what information you want. As an example, this is the one often used on the sites I’ve played this on:
Song:
Genre/Fandom:
Protagonist:
Preferred pairing/other characters:
Other information:
4.) Once you have your thread and all your information up, you then wait for somebody else to prompt you. That’s the challenge part- the other person or people playing will assign you a song, which character to use, etc. However, and this is the most important part of the rules for this challenge to be fair, you must give them prompts as well. Playing by the rules means that everybody depends on prompts from other people playing the game, and it quickly gets unfair and not fun for other people if they are giving prompts to somebody who won’t give them any in return.
SO, if you like the idea of this game but struggle when it comes to giving prompts to other people, I suggest NOT playing by the rules and doing completely self-prompted, which means you shuffle a list of songs at random and then you decide what to write with them. That’s basically kind of like rapidfire without time limits, but another way you can do this! :3 All depends on what you like best.

XD and yeah sorry to soil this forum with so many posts, I just love writing challenges and music myself so I thought maybe somebody else would be interested to see this! HAPPY CHALLENGING IF YOU DO ANY OF THEM.

[Ulysses Septimus]

Here's two I came up with

Jigsaw Story:
-It needs at least two participants

1.You, or another person, comes up with the start of a story, based on a vague plot line everyone agrees on beforehand. Note the plot line has to be VAGUE and MAKES SENSE.
2.You pass that part onto another person and let them continue it in the own style for as much as they want.
3.That person passes it back to you or to another participant when they are done.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have a complete story.


Song Exchange Challenge
-Like above, this one needs at least two person
1. You open your music player and choose a song, any song you like, along with a single prompt word (hate, anger, love, etc).
2. Give the lyrics to the song and the prompt to the other person while they give you theirs.
3. Both of you write a one shot based on the song and prompt word.
4. Exchange stories.
5. Repeat steps 1 through 4 as many times as you want.