Weekly Prompt: Stolen Worlds

Summary

The website content outlines a creative writing challenge for June, inviting writers to reimagine and describe their favorite fictional worlds without their original plots or characters, for other writers to use in subsequent challenges.

Abstract

The first weekly challenge for June on the website is themed "Unoriginal," encouraging writers to overcome the fear of unoriginality by deliberately borrowing and transforming well-known settings. Participants are tasked with selecting a famous world from their childhood memories, stripping it of its heroes and heroines, and providing a 300-word description of this "Empty World" for others to utilize in a future writing exercise. The challenge emphasizes collaboration and creativity, asking writers to convey the essence of these settings without revealing their true identities, allowing fellow writers to guess the origins of these reimagined worlds. Writers are instructed to link to the original world in their bio and to use specific tags for their submissions.

Opinions

The challenge is designed to confront and alleviate concerns about originality in writing.
It encourages quieter, creative individuals to actively participate and share their work.
The task requires a balance between providing enough detail to evoke the original world while maintaining ambiguity to spark curiosity and guesswork among peers.
The requirement to exclude main characters and plots from the descriptions serves to inspire new narratives within familiar settings.
The challenge is seen as both purposeful and manageable, suggesting that constraints can enhance creativity.
By engaging with the challenge, writers are expected to contribute to a collaborative environment that values shared inspiration and collective storytelling.

Seek out your favourite worlds and share them in your own words.

Earthrise and the Blue Marble via Pixabay

Welcome to the first weekly challenge for June, where the theme is Unoriginal.

As we said in the Monthly Theme announcement, the goal is to get you to overcome our fears of being unoriginal, of accidentally borrowing, by downright stealing and making our own.

June is a month for collaborating, so you quiet creative lurkers, we’re going to rattle the tree and shake you loose.

This week your challenge, your adventure, is to journey out in the cosmos of your childhood and steal a world you most loved.

Bring it back to us without its heroes and heroines, to use as an Empty World; we can fill with adventures by our lost wanderers looking for meaning.

Take a famous world, describe it to us, in your own words (no copy and paste — the lawsuits would be legendary) without the original plot or main characters, to create an Empty World for your fellow writers to borrow in Week 2.

Think of Gotham City without the Dark Knight or anyone else of note, or The Shire without any of the famous hobbitses.

Describe it to us as Paul Mansfield did with Monaxia, if you mention a threat keep it vague, you can’t say Lord Sauron.

Or as Smillew Rahcuef did with his quirky Pianoland.

Hide the name and any obvious clues; let’s see if we can even guess its true nature. Fellow writers, add your guesses in the comments.

Challenge Requirements

Your story must:

Steal a world, a favourite setting, from a famous story or author.

In a non-spoiler fashion, link out from your bio to the world you’ve stolen, for those who can’t guess but must know.

Describe it in exactly 300 words long, excluding the title, subtitle, and post-story bio/links. (We use Medium’s word count feature.)

Be fictional, even if it includes factual information or concerns.

Use “Stolen World” and “Empty World” as two of your five tags.

It may seem difficult, but it’s purposeful and what is purposeful is manageable.