The Making of a Story - How 'Guard My Body' Came to be

This is the first story that I’ve published that resulted from a writing prompt. So I thought I’d write a post about how this story came to be, in case it is of interest to others. I guess this is sort of a behind-the-scenes type thing like they do with movies and TV shows.

When I’d finished drafting Beach Fling with the Biker, I wasn’t sure what I was going to tackle next. I needed something to keep me productive, so I wasn’t six months or more between releases again.

I have used the editor on the Reedsy website for the past few stories to format my manuscripts into ePub to upload to Amazon. It made that part of the process quicker and easier for me. One day when I was on their site, I noticed they had a thing called a Plot Generator. So I thought I would indulge in a bit of creative procrastination to see what it did.

A Writing Prompt to Get Me Going

First off, their Plot Generator is not some AI thing. As of now, I’m staying away from AI for my creative writing. There is far too much dispute over copyright infringement surrounding AI for me to be comfortable with it. With that said, the Plot Generator basically has some occupations, situations, sub-genres, etc., pre-programed in. Basically, it would be the same as if I wrote these things on pieces of paper, shuffled them up and picked something at random.

Anyway, I put in that I wanted to write a romance, hit the generate button, and it displayed different scenarios. Nothing really jumped out at me until I hit upon a bodyguard for a character.

I think the reason bodyguard jumped out at me is that I’ve become obsessed I mean addicted, Ahem, a fan of Korean Dramas in the past several months. At about the time I finished Beach Fling, I’d also finished watching Blood Free, in which the hero is a bodyguard. So that stuck with me.

'Blood Free' a K-Drama I highly recommend 😉

After I played with the prompter a bit, I decided I’d wasted enough time and went back to doing edits on Beach Fling with a Biker. Except, the whole bodyguard thing took hold of me.

Needless to say, I went back to the site the next day and kept generating things until I found something I liked.

Here is what I ended up with:

A bodyguard, who can be stubborn. A writer, who is cautious. It’s an erotic romance story about an arranged marriage. It kicks off near a Mexican dive bar with two characters trapped in an elevator. (Note that: someone in the story has a reputation to salvage.) And there’s a twist! They were childhood best friends.

That’s it. That’s all there was to it, and from that, I developed an entire story.

Writing the Story

If you’ve read the story, you know I didn’t use everything that is in this prompt. And some of the things I did use weren’t really used as this prompt would suggest.

Can’t really say that Jackson, the hero, was stubborn, or that Madison, the heroine, was cautious. They also are not involved in an arranged marriage. Nor where they childhood besties. However, I did sort of slide those two things in a different form briefly.

The Mexican dive bar and the hotel elevator sure did ignite my imagination, though. In fact, my little grey matter thought about how this story would start as I was doing edits on the Beach Fling story. It took such a hold on me that I stayed focused on finishing and publishing Beach Fling just so I could start writing this one.

Because of this percolation period, when I started writing Guard My Body, I’d worked out so much of the story in my head that I’d say I knew everything up to about the half-way point of the story.

Once I had that written, my progress took a stumble. An issue I’m working on overcoming. After hitting a bit of a wall, I got busy creating the cover. When I finally came back to the story, it all came together.

All in all, I had a great time writing this story. To be honest, I thought it turned out to be a cute quick read and I really liked it.

Would I do this again? Maybe. I recently tried to generate another story idea, but nothing really caught my attention. It could be because after I finished drafting this story, another idea took hold of me. One that came from my little noodle brain instead of an outside source.

Well, there you have it. That’s how Guard My Body came to be. Remember this little story is available on Amazon for $.99 or free to borrow in Kindle Unlimited.