1 Hour to Write: Creating a Short Story From Scratch in Only 1 hour

The idea for the 1 Hour To Write stories comes from the time-lapse videos of people painting or drawing pictures. They’re fascinating to watch and give a glimpse into the construction and layers of creativity. I wondered if it would be possible to do something like that in writing. These stories are the result of that idea.

While watching a video of someone writing a story is obviously more boring than watching someone create something visually, I wanted to up the stakes by randomly selecting a genre and three words to be used in the story. The 8 genres I use are: Horror, Romance, Suspense/Thriller, Western, Fantasy/Sci-fi, Real Life, Young Adult, and Humorous. I used a dice and random word generator from the Internet. This way I would not only be writing a story in 1 hour, I would also be creating the story from scratch. I wanted the entire process of generating ideas, writing them down, and editing to take place in a 1-hour time frame.

Once the 1 hour was up and the timer went off, I couldn’t work anymore on the story—not even editing or corrections. Yes, I want to write a decent story, but I wanted to provide a glimpse into the writing process. Hollywood glamorizes (or makes it look miserable) the writing process, showing our hero with bloodshot eyes, unkempt hair, piles of crumpled paper in the corner of the room, and perhaps a half-empty bottle of whiskey sitting next to the unfinished manuscript. They might even be writing their story with their own blood as the ink. Who knows? I write in a house with my dogs lying around me or a coffee shop down the street. Definitely less sexy.

My Randomly Generated Words For This Story: Parade, Pat, Junior

My Random Genre: Western

If you want to see the video of the creation of 1 Hour To Write stories, check out my channel on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WRTJ1F7kBg&t=18s