About
What is this site?
The coolness of this site is its simplicity.
We create blog posts that contain 10 random words or phrases.
In the comment section, you create and submit a cohesive, creative short story tying all the words together.
Why do this?
It’s our goal to offer the creative community a simple, quick way to crush writer’s block and unleash their creative muses. We believe this site provides just that.
Give it a try, but be warned; once you start, it’s hard to stop it’s so addictive. Besides, are you going to let 10 little random words stump you? Will you just take a peek and leave without “proving” how creative you are? We hope not.
The specifics
We’ll post a list of 10 random words or phrases every Monday and Thursday. You do the rest.
UPDATE! We think we may turn these awesome entries into e-books down the road and have a vote/poll and let the community choose the favorites. After all, this is a community blog. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve missed some challenges before finding us. Go back to the older challenges and submit to each. It may just end up a community favorite and inside a book.
The staff
Shane Arthur
Shane is a freelance editor/proofreader, and considers himself the unofficial editing/proofreading sheriff of the Internet. He’s edited/proofed for such noted bloggers as Brian Clark, Terry Whalin, Jon Morrow, Mark McGuinness, Chris Garrett, Sean Platt, and Glenn Murray. He also creates video screen-cast tutorials with notable past works being Tubetorial.com and Teachingsells.com. He’s edited books, and aspires to write his own one day. Being a daddy of two small children, he knows that will be the true challenge.
Sean Platt
Sean Platt is an author and ghostwriter, who writes weekdays at Writer Dad. He is one half of the Collective Inkwell, frequent contributor to Copyblogger, and taller than over 98% of the population. He also bumps his head on ceiling fans and low hanging lights – a lot.
David Wright
David Wright is a writer, cartoonist and former journalist who writes at Blogger Dad and is one half of the Collective Inkwell. He also customizes and designs websites (so email him if you hate the green). David and Sean are currently working on the horror thriller Available Darkness, which is appearing in serialized format each Friday at Collective Inkwell.
The future
We believe we’re going to get such cool submissions from you that we may just create some e-books out of our favorite entries down the road, so don’t submit anything if you are not okay with us doing so. By submitting to this site, you’re granting us the right to publish your submission. However, you are also able to republish your own submission in any way you see fit. You will, of course, be credited in whatever we publish.
Thanks for stopping by. We can’t wait to meet all of you.
Regards,
Shane, Sean & David
{ 5 trackbacks }
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi! I love this idea! Would you mind I steal it and run a creativecopychallenge in Italian?
Hello Michelangelo,
1. We love Italians. Have them come to our site and contribute first.
2. Anything successful is bound to be copied. We may not, however, like it too much if someone tries to “steal” parts of our name or our design or simply uses the word lists we have come up with, as that should be something organic chosen by whatever person is running whatever challenge site that may pop up. You should agree that would not create good karma points.
3. If someone copies our concept, we would hope that they link to us and state where they got the idea from. Again good karma points by doing this.
That’s my opinion. Sean and David will probably weigh in on the matter.
Regards,
Shane
Hi Shane and thanks for your answer.
I’d love to contribute and post my stories here, but I think that my English is simply not good enough (I still don’t get some of the words and having to use a dictionary just to understand the lists of words would spoil writings, I’m afraid).
With “stealing” I simply meant doing a similar game on my personal blog, simply posting lists of Italian words to make a story with. Of course I’d link you; actually, since I liked your idea and think that my few readers would like it too, I plan to link you even if I don’t do my Italian version of “Creativecopychallenge”…
Anyway, before doing anything on my blog, I’ll wait until I’m sure that nobody disagrees with it.
Michelangelo
Me, personally, I think that sounds quite reasonable. Let’s face it, it’s an honor that people love the concept we came up with, and it’s an even bigger honor that people wish to do likewise (in different languages on top of that).
I suspect you will get lots of involvement with your Italian readers. Make sure you warn them about how addicting it is beforehand.
Sounds great, Michelangelo. Best of luck!
Thanks guys, I’ll let you know what happens.
In the meanwhile, have you any suggestion on how to choose the words? I was thinking of resorting to Wikipedia’s “Random article” feature or something similar…
Just do a google search for random word generators and choose one.
That and just pick the words fast without thinking of how they will fit together. People will find a way to make them work.
I also like to include at least one word of phrase from a song or album title that I hear, but that’s just me. Again, I pick this at random, too.
Ok, thanks.
I welcome you to delete this comment once you see it, but you’ve got a typo — “peak” instead of “peek” — in the second paragraph of “Why Do This?”
I don’t spend a lot of time pointing out typos on the web, but since this is a static page for a whole bunch of writer-types, I thought it might be worth fixing.
Aaron, considering I wrote this page ( http://www.copyblogger.com/proofreading-tips ) I should know better. Thus your comment will remain as a reminder to me to watch my own stuff as carefully as I do clients. Thanks buddy.
In your bio paragraphs up above, you say of David, “so email him if you hate the green.”
I don’t. I love the look of the whole site. I am curious how someone would go about emailing you three, though. I can’t find contact info anywhere on the site.
Of course, if you’re diligently protecting your privacy, I can appreciate that.
You have ESP, Aaron. I just sent both of those guys an email 20 minutes ago stating we need to add a contact form to our site. Should be up by end of day. Update: the contact us page is live at http://www.creativecopychallenge.com/contact-us/
David,
I like the green.
You guys need an icon or logo for this site so that when I link on Facebook there is an image to use. Right now the only 4 images on the site aren’t directly related to the CCC. I think it would be fine if it were as simple as “CCC” in your font in green/black, or even if the words “Creative copy challenge” came up.
Just an idea. But it would be good for marketing (especially for all us visual people).
Dave made a graphic for the CCC. Go to this page http://www.bloggerdad.com/, scroll down and look in the right sidebar, and steal that sucker.
Nice, I like it. But I guess what I was saying is that when I post a link in Facebook it would be nice to have an image. In other words, if it is on THIS site (the homepage), it will come up as an option. I don’t think I can attatch an image AND a link…it’s one or the other.
Does that make sense?
I’ll have to talk with Dave and see if there’s something he can do. I’ll get back to you.
Speaking of Facebook, maybe you could set up a Creative Copy Challenge Facebook group page?
The Anaheim Angels were clearly under-dogs in the 2009 American league championsip series, but that did not stop the fans from expecting another world series victory.
After they lost game six to the Yankees and the series, manager Mike Scioscia walked down under the field into the tunnels of Yankee stadium toward his teams locker room. He was trying to dodge reporters at every turn as if he could be incognito and avoid them, but Major League Baseball has a code, win or lose you have to face the post game throng of blood thirsty reporters and answer their questions.
Being that game six was in NY that swarm of reporters were looking to get a rise out of Scioscia by asking him one annoying question after the other.
The last question he answered pissed him off the most,”do you think you will ever win another World Series again?”
He paused for a moment, sneared at the reporter, pushed his hat back above his forehead and said,”not every team is like the Yankees who needed to meet their quota of winning world series number 27. Any time you play in a tight series it’s like a war or battle and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, today we lost. So to that end I am proud on how our guys fought, we will be back next year. Right now I just want go back home to my wife and enjoy some private time with my family. Then I will help our GM figure out what pieces we need to add to the puzzle so we can get back to the world series next year!”
@Matt: Great submission, Matt. And great to see you back. I can’t believe it’s been 27 challenges since you stopped by. Glad you did though. I never would have thought to take this word list into baseball, but that’s what I love about these challenges and you guys’ creativity.