Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Word War

NaNoWriMo is less than a week away, and I need to be fully ready to write 1667 words in a day. So, to ensure that I’m ready for this, I took a page from my fellow NaNo writing buddy, Elizabeth (I’m taking a lot of pages from her book recently! She made need to get a new one! :P), and decided to have a “Word War” as my blog post.

What is a “Word War”? Well, it’s sort of a high speed writing race, in which you take a prompt line and in a pre-determined set time, you write the first thing that comes to you mind as fast as you can based on the prompt line. At the end, your score is decided on how many words you typed. This means that stuff like editing, backspacing and spell-checking all lower your score. The idea is one of quantity over quality. Not only does it help get you creative juices following, but it also helps silence what the NaNoWriMo site calls your “Inner Editor”, who seems to think that everything that your write must be perfect the first time. You’ll never be able to do 1667 words a day if he’s yabbering in your ear.

So from now, up until Friday, I’ll be posting the results of my Word Wars. I hope you enjoy it.

Time: 15 mins
Prompt Line: I had a dream of a secret potato
Word Score: 481

“I had a dream of a secret potato!” she said in a sorta excited voice.

“A secret potato?? What exactly is that?” Alex asked, looking over his shoulder. “How can potato be secret?”

“Well, it was actually, like a talking potato. He had some weird kinda government experiment done on him and he got like, human features and super powers and stuff! And they thought he was like so cool, so they like made him a secret agent! Cool, right?”

Elizabeth looked at Abby and shook her head. “And this is what you get for eating spicy food late at night”

“Hey, I don’t make fun of your dreams. It’s like so not cool to do something like that!”

“One,” Elizabeth replied, “I don’t have dreams about animated produce. Two, anyone who uses the word like as much as you do, deserves to be made fun of.”

Before Abby could respond, Alex motioned for them to be quiet. He pointed to the road which ran next to the woods that they were hiding in, as a large black nondescript black van rumbled around the corner, flanked by large military vehicles. “Here they come,” he said quietly. He motioned to Abby. “Do your stuff!” She nodded and took a deep breath. Mustering all the courage that she could, she leapt out in front of the convoy and held up her hands. The van stopped with a loud noise and its hood crumpled as if it had hit an invisible wall, which, considering Abby’s powers, it had. Soldiers leapt out of the vehicles and began firing. But all the bullets stopped and ricocheted off of the wall that Abby created. Before they could adapt to this new threat, Alex dashed out with his super speed and disarmed them, knocking out each solider as he grabbed their firearm. Elizabeth ran up to the van door and ripped it off. “Out. Now.” She commanded the frightened deliver. He nodded and took off into the woods.

When they were sure that they had neutralized all of their enemies, they all made their way to the back of the van. Using her strength, Elizabeth ripped the door off of the hinges. Peering inside, Alex let out a startled whistle. "Ha!” Abby said "I told you!” Elizabeth tried to hold back her own surprise as she answered Abby, “No you didn’t, you didn't say this.” Inside of the van was nothing more that large sacks of potatoes. “This isn’t a weaponry transport. This is a food supply delivery!”

“I guess it was all for nothing then. Risking our lives for nothing.”

“No it wasn’t “Abby replied rather smugly. We have lots of potatoes now. Elizabeth threw a dirty look Abby’s way which made her forget whatever snide comment she was about to make next.

“Come on guys,” Alex motioned, “Let’s get out of here before someone sees us.”

1 comment:

  1. For the record, a word war, by definition, doesn't necessarily include any sort of prompt. During NaNo, a word war is generally a continuation of whatever section of your novel you're working on.

    But, woo! My book is so page-less; I love it. And I am VERY excited for NaNo this year.

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