The Up-Goer Five Very Cold Water Breaking Game

[rustydragonfly]

Here's an unofficial icebreaker type game, inspired by xkcd and also this thread.

Using the Up-Goer Five Text Editor, write a summary of your canon and post it in the comments. The catch? Just like in the original comic, the editor restricts you to only the thousand most used words in the English language, so you have to get creative

Comments

[shayna611]

I am awful at summaries. I always find myself wanting to mention a million details and ramble on, and when I convince myself to leave them out instead I'm not sure if I'm making much sense. I went for a very truncated version of things here. "Magic" was my nemesis.

There are six girl gods who have powers over fire, water, rocks, air, life, and death, and one person for each girl god who can use her powers. Other people draw pictures to make things happen.

The man who has life powers lives at a school where people learn to make pictures to make dead things live again. The girl god talks to him in his head and this makes him angry. A story from a long time ago says his son will make the gods angry so he is not supposed to have babies. He has a boy friend who everyone is mean to and a girl friend who is mean to everyone and they get into lots of trouble together.

The woman with fire powers and the woman with water powers are sisters. They are from an important family and they fight things for a job. The woman with fire powers is in love with the man with death powers (which is not so bad as it sounds, he makes hurt things better) and he loves her too. But her sister loves him too so she is sad. But she meets the man with rock powers and they love each other so she is happy.

There is a lot of fighting and some trouble with babies and some people think other people are dead and don't talk to people they love for a long, long time. Then the people use their powers and a building that goes from place to place to make the girl gods appear and more trouble happens.

[rustydragonfly]

Me too. I had to really curb myself and leave out a bunch of stuff.

a boy friend who everyone is mean to

BEST DESCRIPTION OF KAIRN EVER. Actually this whole thing is perfect.

[shayna611]

I kept backing up and deleting and rewriting a bunch of times because I kept falling into long winded ramblings, but it was so much fun!

And thanks, even I (maybe especially I?) can't help being mean to him.

[rustydragonfly]

Mine very nearly had more description of the RWAU and its main plot, but I had to stop because I couldn't describe Sheffield without some ridiculous contortions like "the place where there was once a story about some men who didn't have any money so they took all their clothes off" and it was getting WAY too long. And silly. But this is all about silly.

Yours is another actually good summary. I find that if you have a long canon with lots of thing happening, being forced to describe it in simple terms actually helps make it clear what's going on. I'm actually learning a lot about other people's canons here and I can't tell how high that is on the sad-ometer, but it's probably a lot.

[shayna611]

I'm finding the same thing too - that the forced simplification is maybe making us choose to point to parts of our stories that get lost among the details otherwise, and for some of these I feel like I am getting insight I didn't have before.

I liked your summary too. I think it was a good description of the premise rather than a lot of the plot, which is where I always have a hard time drawing the line when trying to write one.

[roisin_farrell]

"girl friend who is mean to everyone"

LOL. Perfect description of Reida.

The whole thing is just really great.

[hi_falootin]

love the descriptions of sethan's posse. And actually the way you identified the characters worked pretty well!

that last paragraph XD