Word Crawls

Things are pretty quiet at the moment, as most of my classes have been cancelled because of the UCU Strikes (for the record, I do support the strikes). Although it is Sod's Law that the one workshop that isn't cancelled is a 9:00 am. Anyway, I've been trying to pass the time by working on some of my assignments, and stumbled across an interesting writing challenge: Word Crawls.

For those who don't know, a word crawl is a collection of writing challenges which involve a short word count goal, a time goal, or sometimes both. The other day, one of my writer friends tweeted a blog post from the group behind National Novel Writing Month. The post discussed a Harry Potter-themed word crawl. It looked fun, so I decided to give it a go today. I've been asked to bring a draft for an assignment in the workshop that was cancelled, and decided to partially apply that.

This particular crawl was based around the events of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Each challenge is building the narrative of a young wizard on their first year at Hogwarts alongside Harry Potter. Initially starting with a simple warm-up task to write 100 words, the crawl was broken down into five parts, three of which I went through.

Part 1: Diagon Alley

The first challenge in this part is meant to represent a visit to the Gringotts wizard bank to withdraw funds. This consists of a ten minute writing session, which awards Galleons (gold coins) based on how much you wrote in the session. You should keep a note of how many Galleons you have, because you can pay them to skip challenges later down the line (this gets more expensive as the crawl progresses). Unfortunately, I only managed 130 words, which is worth just one Galleon (and ten words off getting two).

Following on from this is a trip to Ollivander's to buy a wand. This is a simple word count challenge, based on a die roll. I rolled a one, so that's another 100 words. And also means my wand's core is made from unicorn hair. Being a Dungeons & Dragons player, I did make a joke about what die to roll.

The third challenge in this segment was a 15 minute writing session representing a search for a pet. The options are a cat, a rat, or an owl. And including the chosen pet in the story grants an additional Galleon. I probably should have left that to a Twitter poll, but I settled with an owl because it seemed like the most fitting for what I was working on.

Part 2: The Hogwarts Express

The train ride to Hogwarts is represented by a simple exercise to get your word count to the nearest thousand. But if you need to write more than 500 words to reach the milestone, you receive an additional Galleon.

There is only one other challenge in this segment, but you have to pick one from a list of four (or pay a Galleon - meaning that in narrative terms you're paying a bribe not to buy sweets). To make things more random, I conducted a Twitter poll in which I innocuously asked what confectionary from the Harry Potter universe people wanted to try. The overall winner was the Chocolate Frog, which brought with it a simple five minute writing session (from chasing down the frog). That came off as something of a relief, because one of the other options was Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. And the challenge for that involves trying to write 500 words in five minutes in a challenge known as the "50 Headed Hydra" (in the narrative, you're trying to get rid of the taste of the earwax-flavoured bean you just ate).

Part 3: The Sorting Hat

The first challenge in this segment involved a simple ten minute writing sprint, representing time spent socialising with other first year students while waiting in the main hall of Hogwarts. Nothing much to that one, really.

Anyway, the next challenge is another one in which you have a choice of four. As the segment suggests, this represents what house you're being sorted into (your house also allows you to skip certain challenges without paying any Galleons). I consider myself a Ravenclaw, because the Wikipedia page claims the house values intelligence, creativity, learning, and wit. Their challenge is simply to calculate how many words you need to write to get to the next thousand, and then write them. That one took the bulk of the session.

The third challenge represents you socialising with other people on the table and your house ghost during the welcome feast. The exact challenge is one known as "The Three Digit Challenge", in which you share the last three digits of your word count with another participant, and they have to write that much. Because I'm a lonely stick-in-the-mud, I simply paid two Galleons to skip this challenge.

As I applied this challenge to 2,250-word short story, I opted to wrap things up there. However, I still had fun with it, and might try it again with a bigger project at some point in the near-future.

If you want to give this a go, the full details can be found at the NaNoWriMo forum here: https://blog.nanowrimo.org/post/176063372241/harry-potter-word-crawl-year-one 

Until then, happy writing.