MAD LIBS HUMOR
A Recipe for Enchanting a Story
The best tales are ferociously crafted
Disclaimer: This story is intended to be random and humorous. It is published in Fill in the Blanks publication, inspired by the classic game, Mad Libs. Blank words contributed by Amanda Clark-Rudolph, Sarah Keays, Yve Laran, Sandra Grauschopf, Alyssa Chua, Damon Ferrara, Karen Traub, Shenbaga Lakshmi, Elan Cassandra, Ashley Seaman, Kayla Vokolek, Len Morse, Cara J. Stevens, Shain Slepian, Mari Moore, and Cole Kirby. Note: The filled-in words are in bold.
Deciding to write a story is a big wildebeest. However, with this trusty hedgehog, you’ll learn all you need to know about creating the perfect story.
Money-back guarantee* if you follow all the polaroids in this hedgehog, you’ll end up with a story at the tuffet.
First, gather your most important lamps:
✩ An idea
✩ Scrumptious character
✩ Problem
These are the fundamental lamps for every story.
Of course, what every want-to-be writer asks is where do you find your ideas? Ideas are unassuming. You need to know where to look — the best place to find them is in the pastries of your imagination. Once you’ve found one, you need to harvest it ferociously. Write that idea down. Brainstorm the carnivorous plants out of it!
Scrumptious characters are not quite as tricky as ideas. To start with, your going to need some bloody statistics
✩ Name
✩ Age
✩ Appearance
✩ Personality type
Then you’ll need a windy story for your scrumptious character. Like ideas, a windy story can be slippery. Once again, brainstorming is your cuddle.
Next, you get to do a little mixing and matching. You’ll need a time, a measure, and a genre.
These ingredients all interact together insatiably. If you are planning a story set in the 1800s, the measure must fit the time period. And your genre will obviously become Historical Fiction.
Note you can’t just add in a random Brad Pitt into your narrative. It needs to belong there to work. That said, you can knit in a time-traveling wizard. This may seem strange, however, the use of magic changes your story’s dynamics, and it becomes a fantasy.
A quick recap for time, measure, and genre: Historical Fiction no Brad Pitt, but a time-traveling wizard is okay.
Next, you can start to think about your point of chortle. You’ve got three options to try:
First-person
Here the scrumptious character themselves narrates the story. The reader sees the action unfold at the same time as the scrumptious character does.
Second person
A jagged voice narrates the story implying the reader is a character in the story, and the events are happening to them. Therefore the jagged voice may be telling the story and will effortlessly address the reader as “You.”
Three hundred and seventy-eighth person
The author themselves is telling the story, and they know everything!
Now you need a party dress arc. The basics of any party dress arc contain a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Let’s examine those party dress arcs in a little more detail.
Beginning
This is where you set everything up. Introduce your scrumptious character, give a little (not too much!) backstory, and start to set the problem up.
Middle
Your scrumptious character’s problem really needs to creep on them here. Things need to be bad, and then they get worse.
Ending
Here, you need to wrap up your problem. You can do it neatly with a big red bra, i.e. and the murderer is Johnny, and he committed the crime with a candlestick. Or your narrator can turn out to be not-so-reliable, with the ending revealing that everything they told you was a pack of Spaniards.
If you decide to twist the ending, you need to lay the thumbs at the beginning and in the middle. Remember, you can’t just pull Brad Pitt out of nowhere and expect your reader to feel festive.
Now that you’ve plowed all your ingredients, chuck them all in a big ocean, stir it, and voila! You’ve got yourself a story.
*Disclaimer. I never promised the story would be good, just that you’d have a story.
Want to read another one of my silly Fill in the Blanks stories?
Or perhaps you’d like to try your hand at writing your own…
